Discretionary access controls in a high-performance object management system

A method for efficiently implementing access control lists (ACLs) in the main memory object-oriented database systems (OODBSs) is proposed. The main features of the method are the following: ACLs are not stored directly, but via ACL numbers; and each process has a cache which records results of evaluations of ACLs for this process and certain ACL numbers. The particular implementation of ACL numbers in the High-Performance Portable Common Tool Environment (H-PCTE) is considered, and a set of measures which speed up access controls in the most time-critical data manipulation operations is presented. The author then compares the proposed method with other approaches, and discusses whether and how the proposed method can be used to implement ACLs in a disc-oriented system