Towards a secure platform for distributed mobile object computing

Abstract

We present some issues relevant to the design of a secure platform for distributed mobile computing, that goes beyond existing ad-hoc approaches to software mobility. This platform aims to support wide-area computing applications such as active network infrastructures or network supervision tools. Our contribution is two-fold: the first part of the paper is a survey of the security features of a few languages and virtual machines as regards authentication, access control, and communications security. We then discuss a possible architecture for a secure virtual machine for distributed mobile computing based on interesting features found in the implementations studied.