OSF DCE Application Development Guide--Introduction and Style Guide

Security

ACL library (see Section 3.4.3.2), its ACL management information will be hooked into

the remote ACL implementation routines that make up the DCE ACL library.

Of course, an application still must take care of the details of storing and retrieving its

ACLs (though these tasks are now made much easier by the DCE backing store library

routines), setting up deﬁnitions that determine how its ACLs are interpreted, and so on.

Practical examples of how to do these things can be found in the DCE sample

application (fully reprinted in Appendix A), which is explained in the following sections.

For more detailed information about the interfaces mentioned below, see the

3.4.3.1 Who Does What?

In a properly-setup application ACL manager, who does what? That is, what does the

application code have to do about ACLs, and what is left up to the ACL library?

The DCE Security Service ACL API consists of the following routines:

• sec_acl_bind( )

• sec_acl_bind_to_addr( )

• sec_acl_calc_mask( )

• sec_acl_get_access( )

• sec_acl_get_error_info( )

• sec_acl_get_manager_types()

• sec_acl_get_mgr_types_semantics()

• sec_acl_get_printstring( )

• sec_acl_lookup( )

• sec_acl_replace()

• sec_acl_test_access( )

• sec_acl_test_access_on_behalf( )

As their names suggest (full descriptions can be found in the OSF DCE Application

Development Reference), these routines are what DCE clients call to use and

manipulate ACLs, namely: bind to an object’s ACL; retrieve an ACL; replace (that

is, write to) an ACL; test (via its ACL) access to an object, and so on.

A properly-set-up DCE application does not have to implement any of these

operations; they are all taken care of by the remote ACL implementations in the

DCE ACL library. The only exception to this statement involves the binding

operation. The application must register a routine that can be called by the ACL

library whenever necessary to make up a complete binding to a speciﬁc ACL (this

involves returning an ACL UUID, as will be seen below). This is the application’s

hook into the ACL library implementations: the registered routine will always be

called during a binding operation on any of the application’s ACLs, and once it has

given the library a binding to the desired ACL, the library routines can perform

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