Tisa: Toward Trustworthy Services in a Service-Oriented Architecture

By: Hridesh Rajan and Mahantesh Hosamani

Abstract

Verifying whether a service implementation is conforming to its service-level agreements is important to inspire confidence in services in a service-oriented architecture. A part of these agreements, in particular those that are functional in nature, can be checked by observing the published interface of the service, but other agreements that are more non-functional in nature, are often verified by deploying a monitor that observes the execution of the service implementation. A key problem is that such a monitor must execute in an untrusted environment (at the service provider’s site). Thus, integrity of the results reported by such a monitor crucially depends on its integrity. The key technical contribution of this article is an extension of the traditional notion of a service-oriented architecture that allows clients, brokers and providers to negotiate and validate the integrity of a requirements monitor. We describe an approach, based on hardware-based root of trust, for verifying the integrity of a requirements monitor executing in an untrusted environment. We make two basic claims: first, that it is feasible to realize our approach using existing hardware and software solutions, and second, that integrity verification can be done at a relatively small overhead. To evaluate our feasibility claim, we present a realization of our approach using a commercial requirements monitor. To measure overhead, we have conducted a case study using a collection of web service implementations available with Apache Axis implementation.

ACM Reference

Rajan, H. and Hosamani, M. 2008. Tisa: Toward Trustworthy Services in a Service-Oriented Architecture. IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 1, 4 (2008), 201–213. https://doi.org/10.1109/TSC.2008.18.

BibTeX Reference

@article{RajanHosamani2008,
  author = {Hridesh Rajan and Mahantesh Hosamani},
  title = {Tisa: Toward Trustworthy Services in a Service-Oriented Architecture},
  journal = {{IEEE} Trans. Serv. Comput.},
  volume = {1},
  number = {4},
  pages = {201--213},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.1109/TSC.2008.18},
  abstract = {
  Verifying whether a service implementation is conforming to its service-level
  agreements is important to inspire confidence in services in a
  service-oriented architecture. A part of these agreements, in particular those
  that are functional in nature, can be checked by observing the published
  interface of the service, but other agreements that are more non-functional in
  nature, are often verified by deploying a monitor that observes the execution
  of the service implementation.

  A key problem is that such a monitor must execute in an untrusted environment
  (at the service provider's site). Thus, integrity of the results reported by
  such a monitor crucially depends on its integrity.

  The key technical contribution of this article is an extension of the
  traditional notion of a service-oriented architecture that allows clients,
  brokers and providers to negotiate and validate the integrity of a
  requirements monitor. We describe an approach, based on hardware-based root of
  trust, for verifying the integrity of a requirements monitor executing in an
  untrusted environment. We make two basic claims: first, that it is feasible to
  realize our approach using existing hardware and software solutions, and
  second, that integrity verification can be done at a relatively small
  overhead. To evaluate our feasibility claim, we present a realization of our
  approach using a commercial requirements monitor. To measure overhead, we have
  conducted a case study using a collection of web service implementations
  available with Apache Axis implementation.},
}