DS2OS Deliverable A - Project Overview and Functional Requirements

In the next decade, the Internet web will became more and more integrated in our physical and social environments, and both high-speed and wireless connection will proliferate, causing an increasing demand for IT architectures which are targeted to manage the interactions of many people among them and with different Institutions, Organizations and Enterprises in order to get fun, services and information at a faster rate and lower costs. A key point for these environments and virtual communities will be the ability to manage very complex access control and resource usage scenarios, with no loss in perfor- mance, reliability and security. Because of interoperability and scalability constraints, such architectures cannot rely upon centralized trust and authorization models, but - conversely - they must implement distributed access control models which enable users to share effectively and efficiently computing resources and facilities, applications and data. The Distributed Security-Oriented Operating Systems (DS2OS) Project concerns the design of an open access control infrastructure upon which next-generation distributed computing environments can be effectively and safely built. Specifically, this project aims to implement a such kind of architecture for the SSH system entry service, deploying such implementation in the context of a "proof-of-concept" testbed. This document, named Deliverable A, represents the first of a series of project's deliverables describing the the overall DS2OS architecture with its functional require- ments and design specification. After illustrating reasons and inspiration which led to DS2OS Project, Deliverable A aims to describe DS2OS goals and specify its func- tional requirements. Moreover, it gives an overview of DS2OS architecture, sketching its main components and their mutual relationships. As such, this document is also intended as a "reading key" for other project's deliverables, illustrating the overall organization of DS2OS specification.