SECURITY POLICY APPLIED TO COMMON DATA SECURITY ARCHITECTURE

An improved architecture is provided, based upon the prior art common data security architecture, with the modification of adding in a generic trust policy library (217) at an add-in security modules layer (215) and a policy interpreter (224) at a common security services manager layer (202), so that individual users may provide sets of trust policies in the form of a trust policy description file (223), which uses a generic policy description language provided by the architecture. The architecture provides a generic method of incorporating trust policies into a computing platform in a manner which avoids a prior art problem of the semantics of trust policies which are hard-coded in prior art trust policy modules (117). The architecture also improves management flexibility. In the present disclosure, a generic policy description language is provided, which enables different users to define the semantics of a plurality of trust policies.