Reflective Authorization Systems: Possibilities, Benefits, and Drawbacks

We analyze how to use the reflective approach to integrate an authorization system into a distributed object-oriented framework. The expected benefits from the reflective approach are: more stability of the security layer (i.e., with a more limited number of hidden bugs), better software and development modularity, more reusability, and the possibility to adapt the security module with at most a few changes to other applications. Our analysis is supported by simple and illustrative examples written in Java.