An approach to building a secure and persistent distributed object management system

Abstract

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) proposed by the Object Management Group (OMG) is a widely accepted standard to provide a system level framework in design and implementation of distributed objects. The core of the Object Management Architecture (OMA) is an Object Request Broker (ORB), which provides transparency of object location, activation, and communications. However, the specification provided by the OMG is not sufficient. For instance, there are no security specifications when handling object requests through the ORBs. The lack of such a security service prevents the use of CORBA from handling sensitive data such as personal and corporate financial information; In view of the above, this thesis identifies, explores, and provides an approach to handling secure objects in a distributed environment along with a persistent object service using the CORBA specification. The research specifically involves the design and implementation of a secured distributed object service. This object service requires a persistent service and object storage for storing and retrieving security specific information. To provide a secure distributed object environment, a secure object service using the specifications provided by the OMG has been designed and implemented. In addition, to preserve the persistence of secure information, an object service has been implemented to provide a persistent data store; The secure object service can provide a framework for handling distributed object in applications requiring security clearance such as distributed banking, online stock tradings, internet shopping, geographic and medical information systems