A calculus for access control in distributed systems
Open accessAbstract
We study some of the concepts, protocols, and algorithms for access control in distributed systems, from a logical perspective. We account for how a principal may come to believe that another principal is making a request, either on his own or on someone else's behalf. We also provide a logical language for accesss control lists and theories for deciding whether requests should be granted.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Capability systems established unforgeable authority tokens, delegation by possession, attenuation, and the importance of controlling the complete path to an object.
“Capability systems established unforgeable authority tokens, delegation by possession, attenuation, and the importance of controlling the complete path to an object [1, 7, 20].”
From Authorization for Self-Modifying AI Agent Populations: Conserving Authority across Replacement, Forking, and Rollback (2026) · cites this paper as [1]
Section 5.1 describes capability systems as allowing transferable delegation certificates and delegation of limited rights. The discussion of roles and least privilege says capabilities can be restricted before being passed across address spaces. Our copy does not establish the claims about unforgeable authority tokens or controlling the complete path to an object. (LLM, conf=0.85)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems
Rivest, R. L., Shamir, A., & Adleman, L. (1978) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/359340.359342 · Cited by 13,462 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Zhu, G., & Wang, C. (2026) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2610.00347
- Authors
- Abadi, M., Burrows, M., Lampson, B., & Plotkin, G.
- Affiliations
- Digital Equipment Corp., Palo Alto, CA
- University of Edinburgh (GB)
- Venue
- ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
- Published
- 1993-09
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 706-734
- ISSN
- 0164-0925 (ISSN-L)
- 1558-4593
- OpenAlex
- W1987339920
- Cited by
- 575
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 3 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 23 · 2012: 27
- FWCI
- 32.23
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Access Control and Trust
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Advanced Authentication Protocols Security
- Keywords
- access control, distributed systems, access control lists, logical formalization, authorization protocols, principals
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
