Abstract
We present the design of a framework for secure communication. This framework incorporates authentication and secret message passing without the restructuring of applications: through the use of inheritance, communication classes preserve interfaces while adding security. Each service determines the security measures it will use and the system ensures clients communicate using the correct protocol. We demonstrate extensibility by implementing delegation of authority without modifying the underlying framework. Our delegation protocol permits a disconnected delegator and efficiently supports very frequent delegation and revocation. We describe our implementation of this framework for Choices, an object oriented operating system.
