Flexibly constructing secure groups in Antigone 2.0

Group communication is increasingly used as a low-cost building block for the development of highly available and survivable services in dynamic environments. However, contemporary frameworks often provide limited facilities for the definition and enforcement of precise security policies. This paper presents the Antigone 2.0 framework that allows the flexible specification and enforcement of group security policies. Enforcement is achieved through the policy-directed composition and configuration of sets of basic security services implementing the group. We summarize the design of the Antigone 2.0 architecture, its use and the application programming interface (API). The use of the API is illustrated through two applications built on Antigone: a reliable multicast system and host-level multicast security service. We conclude with a description of the current status and plans for future work