Security in the Spring name service

Abstract

Spring provides a uniform name service for an open ended collection of object types-in principle, any object, of any type, can be bound to any name. The name service implements authentication and access control to protect itself, and provides these same functions in an integrated way for the convenience of clients and the object managers that implement the various objects in the system. An object manager can delegate these functions to the name service, or implement its own policies. The name service is implemented as a collection of name servers which are generally autonomous and separate from each other and also from object managers. The architecture allows trusted and untrusted name servers and object managers to participate in providing naming and in publishing objects. Authentication is done at appropriate times to establish trust. These trust relationships are encoded in capability-like authenticated objects which are reused to avoid authentication complexity and overhead after trust is established. >