A Framework for Secure Service Composition

Abstract

Modern applications are inherently heterogeneous: they are built by composing loosely coupled services that are, usually, offered and operated by different service providers. While this approach increases the flexibility of the composed applications, it makes the implementation of security and trustworthiness requirements difficult. As the number of security requirements is increasing dramatically, there is a need for new approaches that integrate security requirements right from the beginning while composing service-based applications. In this paper, we present a framework for secure service composition using a model-based approach for specifying, building, and executing composed services. As a unique feature, this framework integrates security requirements as a first class citizen and, thus, avoids the ``security as an afterthought'' paradigm.