Despite recent widespread interest in the secure authentication of principals across computer networks there has been considerably less discussion of distributed mechanisms to support authorization and accounting. By generalizing the authentication model to support restricted proxies, both authorization and accounting can be easily supported. This paper presents the proxy model for authorization and shows how the model can be used to support a wide range of authorization and accounting mechanisms. The proxy model strikes a balance between access-control-list and capability-based mechanisms allowing each to be used where appropriate and allowing their use in combination. The paper describes how restricted proxies can be supported using existing authentication methods.

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