Web technologies were initially used for Web publishing and advertising in enterprises. However, over the years Web technologies have merged with other distributed computing technologies and assumed a vital role in satisfying enterprise business needs. This paper takes a systematic and practical look at Web evolution from static HTML to Web-enabled business components that are at the foundation of currently popular Web services (WS). In particular, WS is a result of convergence of the Web with distributed object technologies and is positioned to play a central role in building and integrating enterprise applications in the future. However, the impact of WS is not limited to enterprise boundaries - business-to-business trade and outsourcing through application service providers can also be profoundly impacted. This paper highlights the key aspects of these developments because they will drive the requirements to be satisfied by the current and future Internet technologies. The possible deterrents to these developments and approaches to address these deterrents are also discussed.

Reliance of critical and other commonly used information systems on COTS middleware (CORBA, MOM, Web servers, etc.) has continued to grow tremendously in the past few years. However, COTS middleware is generally too weak to handle intrusions (i.e., information attacks), thus making critical and commonly used information systems highly vulnerable. We evaluate the possible intrusion scenarios associated with today's commercial middleware platforms and discuss the possible impacts. We also describe our approach based on the concepts of fragmentation-redundancy-scattering (FRS) to provide intrusion tolerance to some of these intrusion threats and the utilities provided by the middleware to implement needed functionality. Finally, we set the stage for our current and future work for applying a broad variety of FRS algorithms to a broad spectrum of COTS middleware.

To effectively compete in the competitive telecommunications marketplace, telecommunication service providers need to execute business transactions and exchange business information electronically with each other. The article describes Telcordica/sup TM/ Exchange Link, an interconnection clearinghouse that has been developed at Telcordia Technologies specifically to support B2B exchanges in the telecommunications industry.

In this paper we concentrate on one aspect of information system security, namely that of intrusion tolerance. An intrusion tolerant system is one that continues to function correctly and provide the intended user services in a timely manner even in the face of an information attack. In this paper we concentrate on a technique called fragmentation-redundancy-scattering and investigate as to how agents can be used with this technique to make a system more intrusion tolerant. An algorithm to perform fragmentation and scattering of the file(s) in an optimal manner is also given.