Discovering Secure Service Compositions

Security is an important concern for service based systems, i.e., systems that are composed of autonomous and distributed software services. This is because the overall security of such systems depends on the security of the individual services they deploy and, hence, it is difficult to assess especially in cases where the latter services must be discovered and composed dynamically. This paper presents a novel approach for discovering secure compositions of software services. This approach is based on secure service orchestration patterns, which have been proven to provide certain security properties and can, therefore, be used to generate service compositions that are guaranteed to satisfy these properties by construction. The paper lays the foundations of the secure service orchestration patterns, and presents an algorithm that uses the patterns to generate secure service compositions and a tool realising our entire approach.