The way security mechanisms for large-scale distributed applications are engineered today has a number of serious drawbacks. As a result, secure distributed applications are a) very expensive and error-prone to build, deploy, and integrate, b) complex and error-prone to operate and administer, and still c) far from being adequate to the real-life problems. Drawing on my academic and industrial experiences, I will discuss several recently invented techniques that can improve engineering of security mechanisms for distributed systems. I will specifically talk about improving those mechanisms that are based on the decision-enforcement paradigm, and will use access control as a representative example. I will also briefly describe other relevant projects at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the University of British Columbia.
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