Distributed Systems Security
Security requirements depend in principle on the applications a system is being used for. When discussing the security challenges that are being addressed in distributed systems today, we will therefore emphasize this top down aspect of security analysis.
In particular, we will look into various issues of access control in distributed systems, show how the nature of access control is currently changing, and survey current work on policy languages and on enforcement mechanisms. We will further present some novel applications of distributed systems, e.g. in the area of sensor networks, to demonstrate how security requirements and security mechanisms have to be adapted to new challenges.
We will also give a brief introduction to fundamental cryptographic security
mechanisms. Previous knowledge about cryptography is thus not necessary. It
may help (or get in the way of understanding the new dimensions in distributed systems security).