Abstract: User owned and managed optical networks offer new benefits compared to carrier networks. A user-controlled lightpath provisioning system is designed to address the network management challenges. The prototyped management software has a service-oriented architecture and uses the Jini and JavaSpaces technologies. Since the new management system is a distributed system, it has special requirements on system reliability and security. System reliability is improved by using lease-based resource and service sharing, transaction-based resource reservation, concurrent access and persistent storage of resource information and federation clustering. With these system reliability enhancements, the system is able to maintain its integrity even in the event of partial system failures. Since the new management system may be deployed over a public Internet infrastructure, secure access to the management modules is required. The application of existing system security technologies to the new management system is analyzed.