Identity delegation in policy based systems

With the increase in complexity of enterprise systems, autonomic computing systems are gaining more and more importance. Policy based autonomic systems simplify lives of the system administrators and supporting IT people as they only have to specify the goals or objectives to be met in a suitable language. In this paper, we deal with the problem of identity delegation for policy execution. We propose a concept of 'implicit identity delegation', from policy author to policy enforcer, whereby an autonomic system figures out the right policy enforcer for a given policy and implicitly delegates the task of policy enforcement. © 2006 IEEE.