Abstract Component mobility is an important enabling technology for the design of wide area pervasive applications, but it introduces new challenges in the critical aspect of access control. In particular, when mobility is used for dynamic relocation of distributed components, access from both remote and local mobile components needs to be uniformly controlled. The dynamic determination of execution location, possibly crossing multiple administrative authorities, requires dynamic establishment and enforcement of access control. The deployment over widely heterogeneous hosts and devices requires integration of access control with dynamic probing of resource availability so as to influence the relocation process. This paper presents a model for dynamic specification and enforcement of access control in the context of dynamically relocatable components, and an implementation in the Java‐basedFarGoframework. The specification follows a negotiation‐based protocol that enables dynamic matching of available and required resources by providers and consumers, respectively. Enforcement is provided through a capability‐based secure component reference architecture, which uniformly applies to both local and remote references, and through instance‐level, as opposed to type‐level (supported in Java), access control. Finally, access control is integrated into the programming model in a non‐intrusive fashion, by separating the encoding of access control from the encoding of the logic of the application. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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