Hidden capabilities: towards a flexible protection utility for the internet

This paper presents a protection model based on software capabilities. Its main advantage is that capabilities are hidden from the application programmer, allowing the protection policy of an application to be defined independently from the application code. This is very interesting for protecting an already developed application.Our claim is that this protection model is well suited for a wide range of environments, from clusters of tightly coupled servers to large loosely coupled servers on the Internet. It is particularly interesting when applications are built by assembling many existing pieces of code into a single application.We argue our claim by describing our model and its integration in three different environments: a DSM (Distributed Shared Memory )system [Pérez 95], CORBA (Common Request Broker Architecture) [OMG 91] and the Java programming environment [Java 95].The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In section 2, we provide an overview of our protection model based on hidden software capabilities. Section 3 discusses the integration of this model in a DSM system, an ORB and the Java environment. We conclude in section 4.