The CRISIS Wide Area Security Architecture

This paper presents the design and implementation of a new authentication and access control system, called CRISIS. A goal of CRISIS is to explore the systematic application of a number of design principles to building highly secure systems, including: redundancy to eliminate single points of attack, caching to improve performance and availability over slow and unreliable wide area networks, fine-grained capabilities and roles to enable lightweight control of privilege, and complete local logging of all evidence used to make each access control decision. Measurements of a prototype CRISIS-enabled wide area file system show that in the common case CRISIS adds only marginal overhead relative to unprotected wide area accesses.