Research on Policy Domain Access Control Model in Distributed Systems

Distributed systems, such as peer-to-peer systems, computing grids across multiple organizations, and compositional Web services require a rethinking of basic issues in their design and implementation, especially in access control mechanism. This paper establishes a model of access control in distributed systems named as policy domain access control model. We firstly give definitions of policy, credential and policy domain. And we address the cooperation between policy domains using associative broadcast. Then we examine the issues of its decision mode and the delegation. We discuss an example of stock trading system using policy domain as its access control module. And finally, conclusions and future works are given. We expect that this proposed scheme will be used in nowadays typical distributed systems and provide the ability of consensus decision, recorded delegations and adaptive trust management in the future.