Role based access control in distributed systems

With the recent success of the Internet, security has become a real issue. One of the main goals of security can be outlined as defining an mechanism to control the access to files and applications. Over the last years, we have been implementing such a scheme that enforces a role based access control mechanism in a distributed computing environment. This work was done in the framework of the EC-RACE project SESAME. At the same time, there was a lot of work done by ECMA (European Computer Manufacturers Association) to represent the users' credentials. Our conclusion is that enforcing such a scheme is both realistic and renders the whole system more manageable and auditable.