Semantic Authorization of Mobile Web Services

With the recent developments in the cellular world, the high-end mobile phones and PDAs are becoming pervasive and are being used in different application domains. Integration of the web services and cellular domains lead to the new application domain, mobile web services. Mobile web service provisioning offers many of its applications in domains like e-commerce, collaborative applications, social systems, mobile community support etc. This paper introduces the concept of mobile web services, inspects possible technical usage scenarios, and elaborates on commercial applications and usage scenarios based on previously conducted case studies. We have designed prototypes and conducted experiments towards quantitative feasibility study for this emerging research area of mobile web services, especially focusing on the secure communication and access control. In order to provide proper qualitative justification of security measures, we evaluated security threats in mobile environments, reviewed conventional security requirements for web services, analyzed securitysensitive characteristics of mobile web services, and finally defined critical success factors for controlling access to mobile web services. We proposed to utilize distributed architectures of semantics-based authorization mechanism as an adequate access control solution for mobile web service provisioning.