Interoperability and security support for heterogeneous Cots/Gots/legacy component-based architecture

Abstract : There is a need for Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS), Government-off-the-shelf (GOTS) and legacy components to interoperate in a secure distributed computing environment in order to facilitate the development of evolving applications. This thesis researches existing open standards solutions to the distributed component integration problem and proposes an application framework that supports application wrappers and a uniform security policy external to the components. This application framework adopts an Object Request Broker (ORB) standard based on Microsoft Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). Application wrapper architectures are used to make components conform to the ORB standard. The application framework is shown to operate in a common network architecture. A portion of the Naval Integrated Tactical Environmental System I (NITES I) is used as a case study to demonstrate the utility of this distributed component integration methodology (DCIM).