Role-based authorization in decentralized health care environments

The formation of a distributed system is based on a collection of distributed components and it requires the ability for components to exchange syntactically well-formed messages. To simplify network programming for such interactions and to realize security services for those components, we need a component-based software architecture that enables software components to communicate directly over a network in a reliable and efficient manner. One of those models is Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) which is used for interacting with distributed components within the local intranet. In this paper, we overview an aspect of DCOM concerning software architecture and access control. And we describe the concept of role-based access control (RBAC) which began with multi-user and multi-application on-line systems pioneered in the 1970s. Also we investigate how we can enforce the role-based access control as a security provider within the critical environment such as health care industry accessing distributed components legitimately. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach through a proof-of-concept prototype implementation.

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