Autoself managment

Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine University of London Department of Computing

A Policy Framework for Management of Distributed Systems

Nicodemos C. Damianou

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Engineering of the University of London, and for the Diploma of the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine London, February 2002

Στους γονείς µου, Κωνσταντίνο και Σοφία
(To my parents Constantinos and Sofia)

Abstract
Policy-based management is one of the latest developments in network and distributed systems management. Academic and commercial settings, as well as standardisation bodies are concentrating on policy-based management as a very promising solution for managing large-scale distributed systems. The use of policy-based management in areas such as security is particularly attractive. The introduction of new technologies (e.g. active networks, mobile agents) and the use of the Internet for providing services to customers, increase the security concerns associated with today’s networked environments. Security management involves specification and deployment of access control policies as well as activities such as registration of users or logging and auditing events for dealing with access to critical resources or security violations. The management actions to be performed when an event occurs depend on the enterprise policy. The need is evident for a policy language to support the specification of access control and other management policies. In this thesis we propose a policy framework to support security and management of distributed systems. The framework consists of a policy specification language, an architecture for deploying policies based on the language and a set of tools for specifying and managing policies. In conjunction with the language, the toolkit permits integrated administration of resources, people and policy