CERTIFICATE BASED DISTRIBUTED POLICY ENFORCEMENT

An apparatus and a method for a certificate-based distributed policy system is described. A policy server receives over a communication channel a data structure associated with an object to be managed across a communication boundary between a client and the policy server. The policy server generates an object certificate upon validation of the object and validation of an initiator of the object. The data structure includes a serialized representation of public properties of the object, a hash of the object in a canonical serialized form, and a signature of the public properties and hash using the initiator's private key.