SECURITY ARCHITECTURE OF DCOM AND ITS INTERGRATION WITH RBAC

Abstract

The explosive growth of the Web, the increasing popularity of PCs and the anvances in high-speed network access have brought distributed computing into the mainstream. To simplify network programming and to realize component-based software architectures, distributed objects models have emerged as standards. One of those models is DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) which is a protocol that enables software components to communicate directly over a network in a reliable, and efficient manner. In this paper, we investigate an aspect of DCOM concerning software architecture and secutiry mechanism. Also, we describe the concept of role-based access control (RBAC) which began with multi-user and multi-application on-line systems pioneered in the 1970s. And we investigate how we can enforce the role-based access control as a security provider within DCOM, specially in access security policy.