ROADS: Role-based Authorization and Delegation System

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of ROADS; a rolebased authorization and delegation system, based on a simple distributed security infrastructure called SPKI/SDSI [1]. We have developed a flexible access control mechanism called FLEXI-ACL that allows us to enforce different kinds of authentication schemes so that it becomes easy for a resource administrator to write/update the security policies. ROADS support the the classical features such as group memberships, threshold certificates etc. supported by SPKI/SDSI framework. The application of our system is illustrated with an experimental integration with the distributed auction systems in achieving the distributed closure time of auctions in a consensus way.