As
computers become pervasive in the home and community, a variety of new
applications will emerge which will allow widely distributed users to share and
manipulate continuously evolving
information.
The problem of providing secure access to such information in a timely fashion
is highly challenging in wide area environments where the applications will be
deployed. The project focuses on an integrated approach that will explore the
scalability and security of such demanding applications. To provide interactive
response time to requests for shared information, a variety of consistency
models and protocols will be developed, and they will specially address the
timeliness needs of applications. To secure the applications, a new context-aware
security approach will be explored. In this approach, access can be controlled
not only based on the user that makes the request but also on the security
relevant context of the request. An access control model based on this approach
as well as relevant security services will be developed. A general service architecture
that employs the scalability mechanisms and the associated services will be
built in a distributed object based middleware system. The effectiveness of
these services will be evaluated using novel applications and workloads.