Department of Computer Science

Persistent Distributed Store European Union IVth Framework Long-Term Research Project 22533

This page relates to the participation in PerDiS by the Distributed Systems Research Group in the Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.
There is also a

PerDiS Project home page

maintained at INRIA, Paris. Look there for details of the PerDiS project as a whole including a project overview, project programme, list of deliverables, details of partners and working documents (some of the latter are password protected). The Project Programme is also available locally at QMW for downloading (Postscript).

QMW is a partner in the PerDiS project with INRIA Paris (Coordinating Partner), INRIA Grenoble, INESC Lisbon, CSTB Sophia-Antipolis (the French building research institute) and IEZ (a German software house).

The project started on 1 December 1996 and will run until 30 November 1999.

QMW People

Project Objectives

QMW Role

QMW Deliverables

Year One

• TD.1.1A Security Services Design - June 97.

Year Two

• TD.1.2-A Security Design for the IPF - June 98.
• TD.1.2-C Security Tools Documentation - December 1998
• TD.1.2-D Implementation of security in the IPF plus Appendix A plus Appendix B - December 1998

Year Three

• TD.1.3-A Evaluation of the efficacy of protection - September 1999
• TD.1.3-C Report on Large Scale design and implementation for protection - December 1999
• TD.1.3-D Prototype of security mechanisms for a large-scale Virtual Enterprise - December 1999

QMW Documents

QMW's Papers

• Securing Groupware for the Internet,
  George Coulouris,
  To appear in Information Security Bulletin, October 1998.
  An overview of the security aspects of the PerDiS project for IT professionals and managers.

• Role and Task-based Access Control in the PerDiS Groupware Platform,
  George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Marcus Roberts,
  (Submitted to: Third ACM Workshop on Role-Based Access Control, George Mason University, Washington DC, October 22-23, 1998)
  Abstract: A role- and task-based access control scheme has been developed for use in a class of activities that entail cooperation between principals in a virtual enterprise (VE). Data ownership is associated with the component organisations of a VE, each of which constitutes a trust domain. The role/task model was chosen to meet the requirement for a generic access control scheme independent of application code. The model has been implemented for a software platform that provides shared access to clusters of replicated distributed objects. Implications arising from the integration of the access control model with a data replication scheme are discussed.

• Secure Communication in Non-Uniform Trust Environments,
  George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore and Marcus Roberts,
  (Presented at: ECOOP Workshop on Distributed Object Security, Brussels, 20 July 1998)
  Abstract: Trust cannot be uniform across wide-area networks. There are regions of local trust. Within a region of trust, there can be a set of software components (object managers) that are mutually trusting for the purposes of object sharing, but more global trust models should also be supported. This paper describes such a model and proposes a protocol that exploits local trust to achieve high performance even when objects can migrate between trust domains.

• The Protection of Migrating Objects in a Virtual Enterprise, Jean Dollimore, Marcus Roberts, George Coulouris, Technical Report 748, Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, April 1998.

• A security architecture for PerDiS in Java,
  George Coulouris, Jean Dollimore, Tim Kindberg and Marcus Roberts,
  Position paper for the Workshop on Persistence and Distribution in Java 20-21 October 1997 in Lisbon, Portugal

• Protection of Shared Objects in Cooperative Work
  G. Coulouris and J. Dollimore, Unpublished Paper, January 1995.

• G. Coulouris and J. Dollimore, Security Requirements for Cooperative Work: a model and its system implications Position paper for ACM European SIGOPS Workshop, Dagstull, September 1994.

• G. Coulouris and J. Dollimore, A Security Model for Cooperative Work Tech Report 674, Revised, Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, August 1994.

• G. Coulouris and J. Dollimore, Requirements for security in cooperative work: two case studies Tech Report 671, Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Westfield College, May 1994.

QMW Work In Progress

Salvador Dali: The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory