Composing Access Control Policies of Distributed Components

Software realization of distributed computing systems (DCS) is achieved through the component based software development (CBSD) approach. DCS are generated by composing individual components. While creating such DCS, care must be taken to include the aspects of access control and obtain the resultant access control policy as a function of individual access control policies of the underlying components. A formal framework is needed to achieve this task of composing access control policies. In this paper, we propose an algebra that enables the composition of access control policies of individual components using the interaction patterns between them. A case study is presented which justifies the proposed algebra