Generating secure service compositions

Ensuring that the compositions of services that constitute service-based systems satisfy given security properties is a key prerequisite for the adoption of the service oriented computing paradigm. In this paper, we address this issue using a novel approach that guarantees service composition security by virtue of the generation of compositions. Our approach generates service compositions that are guaranteed to satisfy security properties based on secure service orchestration (SESO) patterns. These patterns express primitive (e.g., sequential, parallel) service orchestrations, which are proven to have certain global security properties if the individual services participating in them have themselves other security properties. The paper shows how SESO patterns can be constructed and gives examples of proofs for such patterns. It also presents the process of using SESO patterns to generate secure service compositions and presents the results of an initial experimental evaluation of the approach.