Service-oriented Assurance – Comprehensive Security by Explicit Assurances

Flexibility to adapt to changing business needs is a core requirement of today’s enterprises. This is addressed by decomposing business processes into services that can be provided by scalable service-oriented architectures. Serviceoriented architectures enable requesters to dynamically discover and use subservices. Today, service selection does not consider security. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Service-Oriented Assurance (SOAS), in which services articulate their offered security assurances as well as assess the security of their sub-services. Products and services with well-specified and verifiable assurances provide guarantees about their security properties. Consequently, SOAS enables discovery of sub-services with the “right” level of security. Applied to business installations, it enables enterprises to perform a well-founded security/price tradeoff for the services used in their business processes.

By: Guenter Karjoth; Birgit Pfitzmann; Matthias Schunter; Michael Waidner

Published in: RZ3625 in 2005

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