CORBA Security Service

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CORBA Security Service

• Presented by Srihari Dammalapati

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What is Security

• Protection of information against unauthorized
  attempts to access or interfere with its
  operation.
• Confidentiality
• Integrity
• Accountability
• Availability

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Threats in a Distributed System

• Gaining access to information that should be
  hidden from the user
• A user pretending as other user and getting
  access controls of the other user
• Security control bypassed
• Eaves dropping on communication line.
• Tampering with communication between objects
• Lack of accountability.

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Key Security Features

• Identification, authentication and privileges
• Security of communication and message passing
• Object invocation Access Control
• Security Auditing
• Delegation
• Security Management and Administration

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Structure of OMA

CORBA facilities
Application objects
Vertical facilities
Horizontal facilities
Business Objects Healthcare Finance Telecommunicat
ion
Compound Docs Object Linking Help
Facilities Desktop Mgmt
Object Request Broker (Software Bus)
Life Cycle Naming Transactions Concurrency Securi
ty persistence
Object services
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ORB ARCHITECTURE
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Authentication,Identity and privilege

• Identifying an principal
• Principal is a human user or system entity that
  is registered in and to the system.
• Set of attributes are associated with the
  principal
• It may have different identity attribute for each
  use or single attribute for all uses
• privileged attributes provide the basis for
  access decisions within CORBA Security Service.

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The CORBA Security Service Authentication Architec
ture
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Security Communication and Message passing

• Identification and authentication of client to
  object and object to client
• Protected transfer of credentials
• Negotiate the protection in transfer of the
  message that is acceptable to both client and
  object

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Object Invocation Access Control

• Client, acting on behalf of current principal can
  access this target object.
• Object invocation policy is encapsulated by
  Access Decision Functions.
• Target side access decision or client side or
  both.

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Security Auditing

• Security relevant events should be identified
  for auditing.
• Two categories of audit policies
• Auditing of ORB and CORBA Security Service events
• Application audit policies which control the
  auditing of events that occur at boundary
  conditions

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Delegation

• The access control passes through chain of
  objects
• No delegation, the intermediate object only uses
  its privileges.
• Intermediate object uses the intiating
  principals privilege
• combined privilege delegation
• composite delegation
• traced delegation

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Security Management and Administration

• Domain - a distinct scope, with which certain
  common characteristics are exhibited and common
  rules observed.
• Security policy domain
• Security technology domain
• Security environment domain
• Managing the security policy domains
• Managing member or objects of domains
• Managing the policies enforced within each domain.

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Conclusions

• CORBA security service is flexible enough to
  support wide variety of security policies
• It is a complex architecture
• The specifications seems to be not completed.

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References

• CORBA security service
• ftp//ftp.omg.org/pub/docs/ptc/98-01-02.pdf
• www.itsecurity.com/corba/corbasec.htm