Maintaining consistency of the security policy in distributed environment

This work addresses the problem of maintaining the consistency of the security policy in a distributed environment. We consider a system composed of the Security Server and multiple Object Managers running on different machines. The Security Server defines the security policy in a small database and Object Managers enforce the policy replicated on each machine. Thus, the system is modeled as a replicated database. However, unlike a typical replicated database where transient inconsistency is often allowed for better performance, due to the very nature of the security policy database, our goal of consistency is one-copy serializability (1SR). Hence, for security concerns, the requirement for achieving 1SR is unquestionable, while the requirement for good performance is also desirable. This paper investigates an invalidation-based consistency protocol within the scope of the Transactional Consistency Protocol (TCP). We show that the proposed consistency control protocol offers both 1SR consistency and good performance.