Building a secure, location transparent object invocation system

This paper addresses efficient object invocation in distributed systems. Such systems include support for transparent object migration between computers connected by a network, delegation and revocation of access to objects in a system, and very high speed communication between objects, whether they are located in the same machine or across the network from each other. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks can be effectively utilized to implement many of the necessary features of secure, location transparent object invocation. By using the switch controller in an ATM network as a repository for location information, and by mapping virtual circuits to pairwise object interactions with explicitly declared rights of each object, we are able to provide a high performance system that is both secure and simple.