Course Instructor: Mihai Ionescu

Syllabus:

Distributed systems are growing dramatically in size and complexity, which pose major challenges into how to reason about their behavior and how to manage them. In this class, we present the main concepts of defining and enforcing policies in such large systems.

First an overview about the specification models and their efficient enforcement is given. Then we will talk about access control policies and discuss the most important existing models, both in industry and research: matrix model, RBAC with its variations, OASIS, Ponder, LGI, etc.

In the second part of the class we will discuss about workflow management systems and policies, with specific examples.

Lastly, we will talk about applications of workflow policies to WEB Services, such as BPEL.