Over recent years there has been increased level of discussion on utility pricing for software. The focus of these discussions is to create new operating cost models where the unit costs are directly tied to the business operations to which they contribute. While creating a fine-grained operating cost model is very important for software solutions such as SaaS, the anticipated technology platforms will need to rely on a set of security mechanisms in order to provide a secure and trustworthy service consumption environment. We present an architecture for secure enterprise services consumption management system and a protocol for secure service consumption for service-oriented technology platforms. Our approach is performance sensitive and utilizes a novel combination of asymmetric and symmetric cryptography, and capability based access control. Access to technology platform services is regulated based on the permissions encoded in cryptographic capability tokens. In this paper we report a work in progress.

Dynamic scripting languages such as Ruby provide language features that enable developers to express their intent more rapidly and with fewer expressions. Organizations started using these languages in order to add enhancements to their existing applications or create composite applications. Current research has not yet addressed how security specification and enforcement can be done for scripting based application development. To fill this gap, we developed a framework for the design and facilitation of security. Our approach enables a business oriented application developer to add high-level security intentions to his business process model. The framework supports the automatic generation of security configuration and enforcement. As a proof-of-concept, we present an architecture and report the implementation status.

In a business environment, effective communication is crucial for the employeepsilas productivity and creativity. In this paper, we propose a SOA-based Collaboration Framework for mobile collaboration applications. This framework aims at promoting the business communication to a new level by means of architectural flexibility, lightweight design approach and a substantially increased availability of cooperation support. As part of our approach, we are working on core collaborative Web Services proposed by the Ecospace project (Ecospace IP). The more complex composite Web Services can be implemented by combining the core Web Services into interaction scenarios using BPEL (OASIS Open,2006) workflow. The client part of the Mobile Collaboration Framework can run on almost any mobile device including regular cell phones and smart phones. We investigate different approaches to building composite collaboration scenarios using workflow engine running on the middleware as well as on the client. Finally, we provide an example for our framework and show how a complex scenario can be implemented using core and composite Web Services.

The requirements for dynamic virtual organization management have been derived from an analysis of the state-of-the-art in service-oriented enterprise management systems and its preparedness for handling more complex, long-term business interactions with multilateral agreements. It was found that these forms of business interactions are currently not well supported with respect to dynamic configuration of membership and business interactions based on trust, security and contract parameters. This resulted in an architecture that extends the state-of-the-art enterprise systems architecture, as well as the protocols for managing the state and membership of the dynamic virtual organization

In mediated information systems clients and various autonomous sources are brought together by mediators. The mediation paradigm needs powerful and expressive security mechanisms considering the dynamics and conflicting interests of the mediation participants. Firstly, we discuss the security requi rements for mediation with an emphasis on confidentiality and authenticity. We argue for basing the enforcement of these properties on certified personal authorization attributes rather than on identification. Using a public key infrastructure such personal authorization attributes can be bound to asymmetric encryption keys by credentials. Secondly, we propose a general design of secure mediation where credentials are roughly used as follows: clients show their eligibility for receiving requested information by the contained personal authorization attributes, and sources and the mediator guarantee confidentiality by using the contained encryption keys. Thirdly, we refine the general design for a specific approach to mediation, given by our prototype of a Multimedia Mediator, MMM. Among other contributions, we define the authorization model and the specification of query access authorizations within the framework of ODL, as well as the authorization and encryption policies for mediation, and we outline the resulting security architecture of the MMM. We also analyze the achievable security properties including support for anonymity, and we discuss the inevitable tradeoffs between security and mediation functionality.