Security becomes even more important in a distributed system. Authentication, authorization, digital signatures, non-repudiation, encryption, and privacy become major issues as we extend the distributed system. The four basic goals of a security system are to protect information, to detect an intrusion, to confine the security breach, and to repair the damage and return the system to a known stable and secure state.
This proposal does not concentrate on security, but will assume a robust underlying infrastructure that provides these services.