Security in WebCom

Abstract

Supporting security in distributed systems is becoming more important with the ongoing work in grids, distributed middlewares and web services. Decentralised security architectures allow the stakeholders in these distributed computations, the providers of both compute resources and the applications executing on them, to have a say in how a computation progresses. One of the most important issues in creating authorisation policies is how the components of these distributed applications are named. Providing a consistent and flexible naming architecture allows more fine-grained and usable security policies to be created and enforced.This paper introduces the naming architecture for the WebCom system. This architecture supports the addressing of all required information, with as much precision as is needed to create sophisticated authorisation policies.