Trade-offs in a Secure Jini Service Architecture

Jini is an infrastructure built on top of the mobile code facilities of the Java programming language enabling clients and services to spontaneously engage in arbitrary usage scenarios. For a small home or office environment the currently available infrastructure might be adequate, but for mission-critical applications it lacks essential security properties. In the sequel we identify weak points in the Jini architecture and its protocols and propose an extension to the architecture that provides a solution to the identified security problems. We describe the design choices underlying our implementation which aims at maximum compatibility with the existing Jini specifications.