A capability-based access control architecture for multi-domain publish/subscribe systems

Publish/subscribe has emerged as an attractive communication paradigm for building Internet-wide distributed systems by decoupling message senders from receivers. So far most of the research on publish/subscribe has focused on efficient event routing, event filtering, and composite event detection. Very little research has been published regarding securing publish/subscribe systems. In this paper we present a capability-based access control architecture that enables multiple domains to co-operate in order to build a shared, wide-scale publish/subscribe system. Our architecture employs SPKI authorisation certificates for delegating access control responsibilities to access control services within independent domains in order to balance security and scalability. The architecture supports controlling access both for new event brokers joining the broker network as well as for clients accessing the publish/subscribe API.