Deborah J. Bodeau, The MITRE Corporation
Charles M. Schmidt, The MITRE Corporation
Vipin Swarup, The MITRE Corporation
F. Javier Thayer, The MITRE Corporation
This report describes the status of distributed object computing (DOC) security. It proposes a strategy to enable evolution to more secure DOC systems and secure interoperability among different DOC systems.
Three DOC paradigms are discussed: the Object Management Group’s (OMG’s) CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture); composable objects, exemplified by Microsoft’s Component Object Model (COM); and mobile objects, exemplified by Java with Remote Method Invocation (RMI). Of these, only CORBA was originally intended to enable distributed object computing. Due to this objective, to the clarity and extent of its documentation, and to its maturity, CORBA concepts and strategies are influential in the other paradigms.
This report is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a framework for characterizing DOC paradigms and an overview comparison of how key concepts are used, interpreted, or refined in the three representative paradigms. This framework is needed because documentation commonly mixes motivation, conceptual models, and technical details. Sections 3 through 5 present overviews of CORBA, COM, and Java RMI using this framework. These overviews are intended to highlight security concerns and to suppress the implementation details that make most presentations of the DOC technologies lengthy, complex, and hard to understand. Section 6 identifies security issues specific to the three paradigms and to interoperability among systems that use different paradigms. Section 6 also proposes strategies for resolving some of those issues. Section 7 presents initial progress following one strategy, that of developing firmer theoretical foundations. The list of references emphasizes resources that can be found on the World-Wide Web. The appendix provides a concise presentation of information about security-relevant objects, interfaces, and attributes to facilitate the development of interoperability bridges. This information is dispersed throughout the CORBASec, COM, and Java specifications and documentation.
