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Tisa: Towards Trustworthy Services in a Service-oriented Architecture

By Hridesh Rajan and Mahantesh Hosamani

Abstract

Verifying whether a service implementation is conforming to its service-level agreements is important to inspire confidence in services in a service-oriented architecture. A part of these agreements, in particular those that are functional in nature, can be checked by observing the published interface of the service, but other agreements that are more non-functional in nature, are often verified by deploying a monitor that observes the execution of the service implementation.

A key problem is that such a monitor must execute in an untrusted environment (at the service provider's site). Thus, integrity of the results reported by such a monitor crucially depends on its integrity.

The key technical contribution of this article is an extension of the traditional notion of a service-oriented architecture that allows clients, brokers and providers to negotiate and validate the integrity of a requirements monitor. We describe an approach, based on hardware-based root of trust, for verifying the integrity of a requirements monitor executing in an untrusted environment. We make two basic claims: first, that it is feasible to realize our approach using existing hardware and software solutions, and second, that integrity verification can be done at a relatively small overhead. To evaluate our feasibility claim, we present a realization of our approach using a commercial requirements monitor. To measure overhead, we have conducted a case study using a collection of web service implementations available with Apache Axis implementation.

Bibliographic Information

@article{Rajan-Hosamani-08,
author = {Hridesh Rajan and Mahantesh Hosamani},
title = {Tisa: Towards Trustworthy Services in a Service-oriented Architecture},
journal = {IEEE Transactions on Services Computing (SOC)},
volume = {1},
number = {},
year = {2008},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Washington, DC, USA},
}


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