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Trust negotiation policy management for service-oriented applications

Service-oriented architectures (SOA), and in particular Web services, have quickly become a popular technology to connect applications both within and across enterprise boundaries. However, as services are increasingly used to implement critical functionality, security has become an important concern impeding the widespread adoption of SOA. Trust negotiation is an approach to access control that may be applied in scenarios where service requesters are often unknown in advance, such as for services available via the public Internet. Rather than relying on requesters' identities, trust negotiation makes access decisions based on the level of trust established between the requester and the provider in a negotiation, during which the parties exchange credentials, which are signed assertions that describe some attributes of the owner. However, managing the evolution of trust negotiation policies is a difficult problem that has not been sufficiently addressed to date. Access control policies have a lifecycle, and they are revised based on applicable business policies. Additionally, because a trust relationship established in a trust negotiation may be long lasting, their evolution must also be managed. Simply allowing a negotiation to continue according to an old policy may be undesirable, especially if new important constraints have been added. In this thesis, we introduce a model-driven trust negotiation framework for service-oriented applications. The framework employs a model for trust negotiation, based on state machines, that allows automated generation of the control structures necessary to enforce trust negotiation policies from the visual model of the policy. Our policy model also supports lifecycle management. We provide sets of operations to modify policies and to manage ongoing negotiations, and operators for identifying and managing impacts of changes to trust negotiation policies on ongoing trust negotiations. The framework presented in the thesis has been implemented in the Trust-Serv prototype, which leverages industry specifications such as WS-Security and WS-Trust to offer a container-centric mechanism for deploying trust negotiation that is transparent to the services being protected.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/187146
Date January 2006
CreatorsSkogsrud, Halvard, Computer Science & Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, UNSW
PublisherAwarded by:University of New South Wales. Computer Science and Engineering
Source SetsAustraliasian Digital Theses Program
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
RightsCopyright Halvard Skogsrud, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright

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