Access Control Protocol for Conversation Based Composite Web Services in Pervasive Computing

The emerging paradigm of pervasive computing and web services needs a flexible service discovery and composition infrastructure. The widespread use of Web services in pervasive environments is hindered by the lack of adequate security and privacy support. In this paper, we discuss an access control protocol for conversation-based (composite) Web services. This approach takes into account the conversational nature of composite web services and differentiates two types of web service: goal-driven and interaction-intensive. The former is goal driven and the client cares about the final goal and participates the conversation at only a few steps. While the interaction-intensive composite web service is interaction heavy, and the service and the client need to interact with each other frequently to exchange access control credentials.