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Reconciling Trust and Modularity Goals for Web Services

By Hridesh Rajan, Jia Tao, Steve Shaner, and Gary T. Leavens

Abstract

Web services are distributed software components, typically decoupled from each other using interfaces with specified behaviors. However, such behavioral specifications are largely insufficient to demonstrate compliance with non-functional policies. For example, using just the behavioral description of a health care service that answers a patient's health related queries, the service provider cannot demonstrate whether the query is answered only by a doctor (and not by a secretary). Demonstrating compliance with such policies is important for satisfying governmental privacy regulations.

In this work, we provide a language design that enables such reasoning, while hiding the service's source code. The key idea is to use greybox specifications to allow service providers to selectively hide and expose parts of their implementation. The overall reasoning problem is then reduced to two subproblems: whether the greybox specification satisfies the desired properties, and whether the service implementation conforms to the greybox specification. We solve the first problem by reducing it to a state exploration problem and the second problem by reducing it to a refinement problem. We formally study the interesting properties of this technique using a core language for distributed systems.

Bibliographic Information

@Techreport{Rajan-Tao-Shaner-Leavens-08,
author = {Hridesh Rajan and Jia Tao and Steve M. Shaner and Gary T. Leavens},
title = {Reconciling Trust and Modularity Goals in Web Services},
institution = {Dept. of Computer Sc., Iowa State University},
year = {2008},
number = {08-07},
month = {July},
URL = {ftp://ftp.cs.iastate.edu/pub/techreports/TR08-07/TR.pdf},
Annote = {51 references}
}

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