A reusable intelligent authorization design for web services software security

Web services are a new way of thinking in distributed computing. They are an important step towards service-oriented architecture (SOA). Web services are used to obtain service in an open, platform independent way. Recent focus on web services has been in the area of security, which is an ongoing concern in many areas and is very pertinent to web services technology. This paper describes the design of a reusable authorization layer for web services software. This layer resides separate from the web services themselves and uses a rule based inference engine for determining authorization and access rights. It also uses different types of access control to formulate feature-rich rules.