SecureMiddleware is a sophisticated platform for the development of large scale, mission critical and secure distributed systems. It consists of a CORBA Components (CCM) runtime platform with improved security support and development tools providing tight integration with the OMG Model Driven Architecture.

SecureMiddleware is an implementation of the CORBA Component Model (CCM), which is one of the best platforms for developing large scale distributed systems. It is based on the mature CORBA middleware and adds some more advanced concepts. It also simplifies the usage of some CORBA Services.
CCM enhances the Object Model of CORBA. Figure 1 depicts the features a CORBA Component can have. A component has a component interface (equivalent interface). This interface provides operations for introspections and navigation regarding other components features. A component can provide a set of facets. A facet is a named port providing a specific interface.

Clients of this component call operations on a facet. The facet’s counterpart, a receptacle, is a named port where a specific interface can be connected to. A facet of a CORBA Component in
server role can be connected to a receptacle of a CORBA Component in a client role. Receptacle ports make dependencies to other interfaces explicit, which helps to minimize wrong configurations and run-time failures by providing type safety.

As facets and receptacles are used for operational interactions, the event sources and event sinks are used for event based interactions and message exchange. An event source can publish or emit events of a certain type. Event sinks can consume events of a certain type. A similar port concept for continuous interactions (i.e. data streams) is lately introduced by the OMG to the CORBA Component Model. A stream source port produces streams of data of a specific type while a stream sink port can receive such data. Attributes can be used to configure an instance
of a CORBA Component.

CCM also defines the container as the run-time environment of a CORBA Component (see figure 2), including an interface to the component which is called context, that provides access to the underlying platform services (e.g. CORBA Services) as well as access to the application environment of the component (e.g. connected interfaces at receptacle ports). Furthermore, the
component implementation provides a call-back interface to the container which is in turn used to manage the life-cycle of the component implementation. In the container also resides a Home,
which is an implementation of factory and finder pattern for managing component instances.

SecureMiddleware leverages the security features of its built-in MICO CORBA implementation (see MICO section) and some extensions (e.g. more fine-grained access control). Its security features can be conveniently managed using OpenPMF.