Distributed audit with secure remote procedure calls

The authors have designed and implemented an experimental secure remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism and an RPC interface for a distributed audit mechanism running on AIX version 3 on the RISC System/6000. Based on the secure RPC mechanism and the network file system, the authors have designed and implemented a high-level, protocol-transparent interface for a distributed audit mechanism with centralized control. In addition, they implemented a user-friendly interface for distributed audit with Motif widgets on the X Window system. It is noted that the present experimental secure RPC shows a fairly simple alternative to building secure RPCs with an authentication protocol without modifying the RPC runtime and interface. Using RPCs not only significantly reduces the efforts for programming, but also bypasses several technical details such as replayed transactions, which are taken care of by RPC runtime