CACL: Efficient fine-grained protection for objects

Abstract

CACL is a protection scheme for objects that offers a simple and flexible model of protection and has an efficient, software-only implementation. The model, based on Access Control Lists (ACLs) integrated with the type system, allows owners to control who may invoke which methods on which objects, permits cooperation between mutually suspicious principals, allows ownership of objects to be transferred safely, prevents unwanted propagation of authority between principals, and allows changes to the authorization information to take effect on the next method invocation. The implementation, based on the integration of Capabilities with method dispatch, avoids the overhead of access checking in the majority of invocations, at the cost of space for extra dispatch vectors. CACL offers a viable mechanism for fine-grained protection in an object-oriented database system.