Bootstrapping trust in service oriented architecture

By: Mahantesh Hosamani

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Abstract

Services in a service-oriented architecture are designed to meet desired functional and non-functional requirements. Conformance of a service implementation to its functional requirements can be tested by observing the interface of the service but it is hard to enforce non-functional requirements such as data privacy and safety properties by monitoring the interface alone. Instead the implementation of the service need to be monitored for its conformance to the non-functional properties. A requirement’s monitor can be deployed to check this conformance. A key problem is that such monitor must execute in an untrustworthy environment (at the service provider’s location).;We argue that the integrity of the reported results of such a monitor crucially depends on the integrity of the monitor itself. Previous research results on trustworthy computing has shown that static properties, such as the checksum, of a remote program can be verified using a hardware-based mechanism called trusted platform module.;This thesis makes two contributions. First, we extend the traditional notion of a service-oriented architecture to accommodate the requirements for trust. Second, we propose a dynamic attestation mechanism that serves to support our extensions. 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 untrusted environment with respect to a class of non-functional requirements using our approach. Lack of data privacy during online transactions is a major cause of concern among e-commerce users. By providing a technique to monitor such properties in a decoupled environment our work promises to address the issue of guaranteeing the privacy of confidential client data on the provider’s side in a Service Oriented Architecture.

ACM Reference

Hosamani, M. 2007. Bootstrapping trust in service oriented architecture. Iowa State University.

BibTeX Reference

@phdthesis{hosamani2007bootstrapping,
  title = {Bootstrapping trust in service oriented architecture},
  author = {Hosamani, Mahantesh},
  year = {2007},
  school = {Iowa State University},
  abstract = {
    Services in a service-oriented architecture are designed to meet desired
    functional and non-functional requirements. Conformance of a service
    implementation to its functional requirements can be tested by observing the
    interface of the service but it is hard to enforce non-functional requirements
    such as data privacy and safety properties by monitoring the interface alone.
    Instead the implementation of the service need to be monitored for its
    conformance to the non-functional properties. A requirement's monitor can be
    deployed to check this conformance. A key problem is that such monitor must
    execute in an untrustworthy environment (at the service provider's location).;We
    argue that the integrity of the reported results of such a monitor crucially
    depends on the integrity of the monitor itself. Previous research results on
    trustworthy computing has shown that static properties, such as the checksum, of
    a remote program can be verified using a hardware-based mechanism called trusted
    platform module.;This thesis makes two contributions. First, we extend the
    traditional notion of a service-oriented architecture to accommodate the
    requirements for trust. Second, we propose a dynamic attestation mechanism that
    serves to support our extensions. 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 untrusted environment with respect to a class of non-functional
    requirements using our approach. Lack of data privacy during online transactions
    is a major cause of concern among e-commerce users. By providing a technique to
    monitor such properties in a decoupled environment our work promises to address
    the issue of guaranteeing the privacy of confidential client data on the
    provider's side in a Service Oriented Architecture.
  }
}