Java Distributed Computing

Chapter 5. Security

Security becomes an issue as soon as you allow your computing resources to come in contact with the rest of the world. With the recent explosion in the use of networks, preserving the security of data and the resources that carry data has become a primary concern. An open communications port on any computing device almost always carries the potential for abuse: a malicious party may steal or damage sensitive information, network bandwidth, or any other resource associated with your site. Security measures can increase the effort needed for an intruder to gain access to these resources.

In this chapter, we’ll look at the Java Security API and how you can use it to make the agents in your distributed application safe from network hostility. We’ll briefly discuss the kinds of security concerns you should have as a distributed application developer, and what tools are available in the Java environment for addressing these issues. Some of the issues we’ll discuss are common across most applications, so the Java language developers have provided integrated features in the runtime environment that attempt to address them. An example of one of these features is the bytecode verifier, which prevents some kinds of malicious code from running on your machine. Other issues are only important in specific domains and applications, and it’s your duty to determine how important these issues are to your particular application, what kinds of measures need to be taken, and how much ...