Security Annotation for DAML Web Services

The focus of this paper is developing ontologies that can be used to annotate web services represented by DAML-S. We propose several security-related ontologies that are designed to represent security standards such as XML Signatures in terms of their characteristics like credentials, mechanisms supported, notations used, etc. These ontologies are used to describe security properties of web services, agents and users. These properties can be specific by stating the particular standards/protocols supported or more general in terms of the security mechanisms used, the credentials required or notations specified. The security properties associated with registered web services as well as requests (originating from other services, agents and human operators) for web services are security requirements and capabilities. A reasoning engine decides whether a web service satisfies a request by comparing security characteristics. The requirements of the request need to be satisfied by the capabilities of the potentially matching web service, whose requirements need to be satisfied by the capabilities specified in the request (which could represent the capabilities of the agent which makes the request). Our prototypical implementation uses JTP, the Java Theorem Prover from Stanford, for deciding the degree to which the requirements and capabilities match based on our matching algorithm.