Security facilities in distributed systems

Security is an essential issue for all computer systems. The security objectives integrity, availability and confidentiality have to be strived for. This is also valid for distributed systems. Already in the development of distributed systems security has to be considered. The COMANDOS project which develops a platform for object-oriented distributed systems has developed a security architecture. It is a framework for several security facilities and comprises security services and security tools. This paper gives an overview of the security architecture and a description of the security services and security tools which have been identified.