A flexible distributed authorization protocol

Abstract

While there has been considerable effort in creating a single sign-on solution for interoperability among authentication methods, such interoperability across authorization methods has received little attention. This paper presents a flexible distributed authorization protocol that provides the full generality of restricted proxies while supporting the functionality of and interoperability with existing authorization models including OSF DCE and SESAME V2. Our authorization protocol includes a delegation method that is well suited for certain electronic commerce applications.