Privilege transfer and revocation in a port-based system

Abstract

Gutenberg is a port-based operating system being designed to study protection issues in distributed systems. In the Gutenberg system, all shared resources are viewed as protected objects and hence can be accessed only via specific operations defined on them. Processes communicate and access objects through the use of ports. Each port is associated with an abstract data type operation and can be created by a process only if the process has the capability to execute the operation on the type. Thus, a port represents the privilege of the port's client process to request a service provided by the port's server process. Privilege transfer is a means of providing servers access to the resources they need to perform their services.