How to Trust a Web Service Monitor Deployed in an Untrusted Environment?

By: Mahantesh Hosamani, Harish Narayanappa, and Hridesh Rajan

Abstract

In a service oriented architecture, certain requirements can be tested by observing the interface of the service whereas other requirements such as data privacy, confidentiality and integrity cannot be tested in this way. After deployment, a requirements monitor is used to analyze the conformance of a web service to such requirements. The integrity of the reported conformance results is as good as of the integrity of the monitor especially when the requirements monitor is executing in an untrustworthy environment. In this paper, we propose a hardware-based dynamic attestation mechanism to validate the integrity of the requirements monitor. To evaluate our approach, we have conducted a case study using a commercial requirements monitor and a collection of web service implementations available with Apache Axis implementation. Our case study demonstrates the feasibility of verifying the conformance of a web service executing in an untrustworthy environment.

ACM Reference

Hosamani, M. et al. 2007. How to Trust Web Services Monitor Executing in an Untrusted Environment? 3rd International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices (Washington, DC, Oct. 2007), To appear.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{hosamani2007trust,
  author={Mahantesh Hosamani and Harish Narayanappa and Hridesh Rajan},
  title = {How to Trust Web Services Monitor Executing in an Untrusted Environment?},
  booktitle = {3rd International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices},
  location = {Seoul, Korea},
  month = {Oct},
  year = {2007},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
  address = {Washington, DC},
  pages = {To appear},
  entrysubtype = {workshop},
  abstract = {
    In a service oriented architecture, certain requirements can be tested by
    observing the interface of the service whereas other requirements such as data
    privacy, confidentiality and integrity cannot be tested in this way. After
    deployment, a requirements monitor is used to analyze the conformance of a web
    service to such requirements. The integrity of the reported conformance
    results is as good as of the integrity of the monitor especially when the
    requirements monitor is executing in an untrustworthy environment. In this
    paper, we propose a hardware-based dynamic attestation mechanism to validate
    the integrity of the requirements monitor. To evaluate our approach, we have
    conducted a case study using a commercial requirements monitor and a
    collection of web service implementations available with Apache Axis
    implementation. Our case study demonstrates the feasibility of verifying the
    conformance of a web service executing in an untrustworthy environment.
  }
}