Flexible and secure service discovery in ubiquitous computing

Dynamic and self organizing systems like those found in pervasive computing systems or semantic Web based scenarios raise numerous SOA deploymentchallenges regarding security and privacy. Service discovery is a basic feature of SOA deployment in such systems, given that entities need to locate services they can describe without an a priory knowledge. After inherent threats to service discovery in ubiquitous networks, we propose a registry based solution in which context- aware security policies are enforced in order to ensure privacy and access control for clients and services. We offer the possibility for the users to specify their security preferences that will be enforced during the discovery process. Experimental results based on an implementation of our approach are finally presented.

Context-Aware Security Policy for the Service Discovery

Service-orientation is an emerging paradigm for building complex systems based on loosely coupled components, deployed and consumed over the network. Despite the original intent of the paradigm, its current instantiations are limited to a single trust domain (e.g., a single organization) One of the main reasons for this is the trust gap that normally arises when software services, offered by previously unknown providers, are to be selected at run-time, without any human intervention. The idea of machine-readable security certificates (called asserts) paves the way to automated reasoning about security properties of services. Similarly to current security certification schemes, the assessment of the security properties of a service is delegated to an independent third party (certification authority), who issues a corresponding assert, bound to the service. Building on the assert concept, this paper describes our proposal for a modular architecture to realise a certification-aware service discovery framework. The architecture supports the discovery of single services based on certified security properties, as well as the dynamic synthesis of service compositions that satisfy the required security properties.

/pdf/an-architecture-for-certification-aware-service-discovery-1n078qrlrs.pdf

An architecture for certification-aware service discovery

As Web services have become the grand vision these days, more and more people are seeking out the practicalities of implementing and using them for business benefit. Thus Web services make application functionality available over the Internet in a standardized, programmatic way. QoS support for Web service has become a widely researched area and has shown to be an effective mechanism in Web services’ discovery particularly in differentiating between services that share similar functionalities and finally by evaluating QOS and providing interface for selecting the web service. In this paper, we are providing a sophisticated architecture for quality driven web service evaluation. Agents are used to evaluate the QWS parameters. This work also discussed about the quality attributes with organized set of design related questions which helps an evaluator to analyze the ability of the architecture to meet quality requirements, and provides a brief sample evaluation. ATAM method of software architecture evaluation is used to evaluate the proposed model. The assessment justifies the proposal in terms of the performance attributes such as reliability, availability, modifiability, security and interoperability etc.

https://www.ijcaonline.org/volume10/number4/pxc3871985.pdf

Architecture for Evaluating Web Service QoS Parameters using Agents

Web services based SOA are dramatically speeding up the application development process. They also see it as a way to build applications and systems that are more adaptable. Web services are poised to have a dramatic effect on business enterprises that think of themselves as independent of technology trends. Web services are being considered an excellent technology to solve distributed computing challenges in the Internet area. So now a days Web Service discovery is an essential element in Service-Oriented Computing. But selecting appropriate web services for the benefits of service consumers is a key issue in service discovery. Web service discovery is based on service functionality and QoS. However, without Web service quality standards and quality-based discovery mechanisms, the trustworthiness of business-to-business interactions can't be guaranteed. Web service discovery spread up into these areas like agent, ontology, semantic, context server. But even though number of techniques, methods proposed for web service is always been a question. We have wide rage of QoS parameters but it is not easy to select the best one. So we are analyzing the QoS parameters and selecting the best service according to the user request. For better decision making the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multiple criteria decision making method, is applied as an underlying mechanism for developing a flexible and effective ranking algorithm.

Parallel analytic hierarchy process for web service discovery and composition

Dynamic and self-organizing systems like those found in ubiquitous computing or semantic web based scenarios raise numerous challenges regarding trust and privacy. Service discovery is a basic feature of SOA deployment in such systems, given that entities need to locate services they can describe but that they do not necessarily know. PKI based solutions to securing this mechanism, which require a preliminary key distribution, are therefore rendered awkward and contrived. In contrast, the new concept of Attribute Based Encryption, derived from Identity Based Encryption schemes, makes it possible to create secret communication channels with unknown services based solely on some attributes that are part of their description and in a decentralized fashion, that is, without the introduction of any additional trusted third party like a registry. This paper discusses how such a scalable solution to enabling secure and decentralized discovery protocols can be implemented and put to use. After reviewing the security properties that are expected, the paper then goes on to detail how to extend the WS-Discovery Web Service protocol with such mechanisms. Preliminary experimental results based on an implementation of this extended protocol are finally presented.

Secure Web Service Discovery: Overcoming Challenges of Ubiquitous Computing

In many practical applications, we often need to form a team of agents to solve a task, since no agent alone has the full set of required competences or the power to complete the task on time. Here, we address the problem of distributing individuals in teams, with each team being in charge of a specific task. In particular, we formalise the problem and propose a heuristic approach to solve it.

Jean-christphe Pazzaglia

Papers

Secure Web Service Discovery: Overcoming Challenges of Ubiquitous Computing

An Anytime Heuristic Algorithm for Allocating Many Teams to Many Tasks