The ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990 Standard ``Portable Operating System Interface for Computer Environments (POSIX),'' (referred to here as POSIX.1 [ISO90a]), defines a standard operating system interface and environment to support application portability at the source code level. It is intended to be used by both application developers and system implementors. [ISO90a, p.21].
POSIX.1 does not address networking issues. However, interfaces that allow for a distributed environment, i.e., mounted file systems, are not precluded. Security is somewhat addressed in POSIX.1. POSIX.1 supports security mechanisms similar to the mechanisms which are implemented on most Unix systems.
Networking and security are essential in the modern computing environment. To meet these needs, two additional POSIX working groups, POSIX.8 ``Transparent File Access,'' [POS93] and POSIX.6 ``Security Extensions'' [POS92b] were created to develop and standardize interfaces to allow for a networked POSIX environment that utilized more robust security mechanisms. This section will briefly discuss these two emerging standards and present some issues that arise when both exist in the same environment.