The purpose of the 2nd Distributed Object Security Workshop is to provide a forum for discussion of security problems relating to distributed object-oriented systems. As object-oriented applications are becoming omnipresent, the need for security has become a pressing issue. The object-oriented paradigm offers basic abstractions such as interfaces and data abstractions which have been used for security. But, for all of these advantages, object systems must deal with issues such as the granularity of protection and dynamic binding which blurs the line between trusted and untrusted components.
Distribution accentuates the existing problems.
In these systems issues such as authenticity, integrity and privacy of messages must be addressed. In truly distributed object-oriented systems, objects may be moved along with their behavior. This brings in new security challenges as trusted and untrusted code may be integrated in the same address space and allowed to interact in intricate ways. Reusability is one of the traditional virtues of object-orientation. However, security problems may arise when objects are reused in an execution context that is different from the context of the original implementation, e.g., the authentication and authorization required by an object modeling a bank account is very different, depending on whether its methods are being invoked from within the banks database or by a home-banking client on the Internet.