The Challenges of CORBA Security

Large, distributed applications play an increasingly central role in today’s IT environment. The diversity and openness of these systems have given rise to questions of trust and security. It is the aim of the project Secure TINA to examine exactly these questions and try to find possible solutions. The focus lies on OMG’s Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) as a basis technology for developing distributed systems and on the Security Service specified for it, since this seems to be the most promising technology in the field. The followed approach is thereby twofold. At first, a thorough analysis of the specification itself and known implementations thereof is performed, based also on experiences in the broader area of distributed systems security. At a second, more practical stage, the attempt to develop an own, prototypical implementation of CORBA Security is undertaken, with the main objective of gaining as much practical experience as possible and experimenting with possible alternatives to find a solution to the problems encountered.