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Essay about Distributed Software Engineering

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4. Security Security is a very critical issue in many systems, especially distributed systems. This is because the system is distributed across a network over many devices, and so there may be more ways for outsiders to access the system who do not have permission to do such. A security breach is considered to be any time an unsafe state is reached within the system. An unsafe state is one in which data can be illegally intercepted, interrupted, modified, or fabricated. Since a distributed system is made up of various smaller systems with the possibility of each system being managed separately, it becomes very important that all parts of the distributed system be managed uniformly and completely to prevent security breaches. …show more content…

These privileges are based on ownership and group roles. A user will be assigned a group on the system. The access control entries set for a given file will either grant or deny access for a specify user, owner, or group of users to the file (whether it be for reading, writing, or executing) [9].
Related to group permissions are role based permissions. These permissions regulate access control based on the role that a user serves (“relation on roles, objects, and rights”) rather than the user itself (“relation on subjects, objects, and rights”) [10]. This allows for further manipulation and customization of access control lists and user permissions which could be very helpful, especially in large systems.
Further use of access control can be extended to objects in object oriented programmed systems, for instance Java [11]. Objects can either be granted or grant to other objects and users the rights to access certain methods and functions. One such method of performing this task is with the use of private, public, or protected visibilities. This will either allow all other objects to access the methods (public) or restrict the use of particular methods to just the containing object (private).
Objects may also utilize access control lists that allow specific entities or users the rights to perform specific actions. The entries in these lists will either allow or deny access of one object to the

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