A tool for securely integrating legacy systems into a distributed environment

Abstract

Legacy systems provide services that remain useful beyond the means of the technology in which they were originally implemented. Our Legacy Wrapper tool packages the services of a legacy application in order to redistribute as a distributed object. In this new environment, the wrapper provides its own layer of security between the security domain of the host and the distributed object system. This security layer includes a sandbox for the application that is designed to protect the application against malicious users and the host from malicious applications. In this paper we present the Legacy Access model and the Legacy Wrapper system. The Legacy Access model is an original system access model that presents a four tiered sandboxing model for wrapping legacy applications: complete encapsulation, shared sandbox, single sandbox, sandboxless operation. The Legacy Wrapper tool is an implementation of the model that combines wrapping an application for security purposes with wrapping it for distribution in a distributed object system.