Issues in the design of secure authorization service for distributed applications

Abstract

As companies migrate from a centralized to a distributed computing environment, the administration and management of security policies, in particular authorization policies, is becoming an increasingly difficult task. This paper considers the issues involved in the design of a secnre distributed authorization service. This paper discusses the architectural design principles, descrihes the Authorization Server architecture and components, briefly mentions some of the key authorization language constructs and outlines the steps involved in the construction of an authorization system in practice.

Authorization in enterprise-wide distributed system: a practical design and application

“…In the case of authorization service, the security information used ranges from user identities to group identities to role information to location information to actions and parameters associated with the actions. In fact, from an architecture point of view, it is important to understand the characteristics of the different types of the authorization security information [13]. Some security information is what we refer to as being generic and static in nature.…”