Rule based Security Policy management for Web Service Integration

With the prevalence of loosely coupled web service composition in the service oriented infrastructure, distributed security management has become important to offer flexible web security. In our project affiliated with NatureServe [2], we developed a XACML [3, 4] policy oriented security system to provide trust data service to 75 network partners in the Natural Heritage Program [1]. A Horn Logic based rule inference engine extension to XACML model is used to solve the possible policy conflicts over context and semantics in the key decision making step. Approaches to facilitate such decision making process in various ways by using the extension are illustrated.