Privacy, Security, and Protection in Distributed Computing Systems

Abstract

The innovations in semiconductor technology in the past decade have brought down the computing hardware cost to such a low level that the system planners of today are more inclined to have distributed systems installed wherever possible and interconnect them through communication networks. The distributed systems basically are candidates for giving increased performance, extensibility, increased availability, and resource sharing. The necessities like multiuser configuration, resource sharing, and some form of communication between the workstations have created a new set of problems with respect to privacy, security, and protection of the system as well as the user and data. This is equally true with automated office systems, which are formed by interconnecting the workstations of various departments, as the access to different sets of classified information may be restricted to different levels of management personnel. Computer privacy is concerned with the type of information collected, the person authorised to collect, the type of access and dissemination, the subject rights, the penalties, and licencing matters. Thus privacy affects all aspects of computer security. The first level of implementation of these privacy issues, the external protection environment, consists of administrative control and physical security. The next level, the internal protection mechanisms, consists of authentication, access control, surveillance, and communications security. Implementation of the internal protection are done at three levels. The first, at the hardware level, is accomplished by means of memory protection, multiple execution states, and/or special front end processors. The second level is implemented through software by means of surveillance mechanism comprising logging, access control, information flow control, and/or threat monitoring or by isolation. The last level is the data security both in database and data transmission. Cryptographic techniques are used for data security. This paper surveys the advances made in different areas of the internal level implementation of the security policies in a computing system with special reference to a distributed computing system with internode communication. Current research is to choose the appropriate internal protection mechanism for a fault tolerant distributed computer system.