Distributed Access Control for Carrier Class Clusters

The telecommunication industry traditionally uses clusters to meet its carrier-class requirements of high availability and reliability. As security has also become a major issue, a Distributed Security Infrastructure (DSI) has been initiated for carrier-class Linux clusters. DSI is a security framework which focuses on providing distributed security services and simplifying security administration. This paper presents one of those services: distributed access control service (DisAC). This service manages access rights throughout the whole cluster with process-level granularity. Rules are configured through a unique security policy, which is propagated to each node of the cluster. DisAC enhances this policy at node level but also inter-node access control with process-level granularity.