Persistence and Security Support for Distributed Systems with Mobile Software Objects Position Paper

Mobile software objects are autonomous computational entities that travel in large-scale and widely-distributed heterogeneous systems, and whose functionality can be attached to diverse computing environments. Incorporation of mobile objects into large-scale distributed systems introduces new challenges to distributed object management (sub)system (DOMS). In this paper we focus on two important aspects of DOMS for mobile objects, persistence and security. The gist of our approach is to enable objects to determine and set the policies governing their own persistence and security, coupled with infrastructure-level mechanisms for managing the persistent store and enforcing the security policies. This approach is embodied in the Hadas object manager, which is fully implemented in Java and utilizes Java's serialization and security manager for persistence and security, respectively.