Authorization and Privacy for Semantic Web Services

Abstract

When choosing, composing, invoking or monitoring a service it may be important or even critical to understand it's security attributes and policies. By security, we refer to a range of related aspects including authentication, authorization, confidentiality and privacy. We discuss how to incorporate security information into the OWL-S Semantic Web service model by integrating descriptions of semantically rich policies for authorization, privacy and confidentiality. These policies can include conditions on attributes of the service requester, provider, and the general context. We describe the ontologies used to annotate OWL-S input and output parameters with respect to their security characteristics, including various types of encryption and digital signatures. We present an algorithm for testing policy compliance that can be integrated into the service selection process of the OWL-S MatchMaker. This integration allows the requester to invoke only those services that match the formers policies and whose policies are met by the requester.