Pay As You Go-Associating Costs with Jini Leases

Jini is a technology for building reliable, fault-tolerant distributed applications. Besides offering an infrastructure for clients to locate services, it introduces the concept of leasing. Leases model time-constrained access granting and are used for distributed garbage collection. In this position paper we propose an extension to the lease concept that allows associating costs with resource access. To make this extension usable in a commercial environment authentication, encryption, and non-repudiation are required. We analyze our extension in this respect and identify the types of security needed. Based on this analysis we introduce an architecture consisting of a number of Jini-enabled services that support non-repudiation and accounting.