Decentralized Jini Security

Abstract

Among the different approaches to distributed computing, the Jini technology provides a number of very promising methods for attacking the fundamental problems involved. Programs built according to the Jini principles will be able to function and survive in highly dynamic network environments, allowing applications to adapt their behaviour to the requirements of the current context. Unfortunately, the security problems that are bound to be present in any large scale deployment of Jini are not adequately addressed by either the current revisions of Jini technology or the underlying Java security solutions. In particular, the solutions proposed so far are either bound to a specific communication protocol---thereby hampering the protocol independence of Jini---or rely on centralized security servers, thereby losing the benefits of the ad hoc nature of Jini. In this paper, we present results of our research that act as stepping stones towards a fully decentralized, complete Jini security ...