VICSDA: using virtual communities to secure service discovery and access

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is emerging as an enabling technology for sharing distributed heterogeneous resources on the network. Consequently, securing services is an increasing concern. Research issues include privacy protection for service providers, transparent access control for service consumers, secure service discovery and composition. In this paper, we present an access control approach which uses virtual communities to secure service discovery and access (VICSDA). Services grouped in virtual communities can only be discovered and accessed by authenticated community members. Meanwhile, services are autonomous to define their local access control policy. Moreover, behavior of these autonomous services is monitored in order to guarantee a better QoS provision. Using a virtual community overlay network on top of a SOA infrastructure, VICSDA can provide authentication, message confidentiality and integrity to secure service discovery and access. Better application performance can be achieved through VICSDA. We integrated VICSDA with a 3D video streaming application. This example provides us with some initial evidence that VICSDA is a viable solution to our target problems.