XML distributed security policy for clusters

With the increasing use of clusters, efficient and flexible security has now become an essential requirement, though it has not yet been addressed in a coherent fashion for distributed systems. This paper presents a new security policy language for clusters: Distributed Security Policy (DSP). Based on XML, this language offers a precise and easy way to customize security of clusters. Contrary to other existing security policy languages, it is not limited to access control, and may be used for other security services such as cluster's inner communication. Finally, the paper also explains how this security policy is used in practice, and how it is transparently enforced onto all nodes of the cluster. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.