PROCESSING OF CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS BY FRAGMENTATION

This paper discusses how object orientation in application design enab les confidentiality aspects to be handled more easily than in conventi onal approaches. The approach is based on the Fragmentation-Redundancy -Scattering technique developed at LAAS-CNRS for several years. This t echnique and previous developments are briefly summarized. The idea de veloped in this paper is based on object fragmentation at design time for reducing data processing in confidential objects; the more non con fidential objects can be produced at design-time, the more application objects can be processed on untrusted shared computers. Still confide ntial objects must be processed on non shared trusted workstations. Ru les and limits of object fragmentation are discussed together with som e criteria evaluating tradeoffs between fragmentation and performance. Finally, a distributed object-oriented support especially fitted for fragmented applications is briefly described. (C) 1997 Elsevier Scienc e B.V.