Designing A Secure Trust Intermediary Service (STIS) For Web Services: A WS-Trust Approach

Recent trends in information technologies have led to vast improved communication facilities such as the Internet, an explosion of on-line information providers and a proliferation of web-based services amidst spontaneous usersNaturally, sources and clients will want to interact with each other in a confidential and privacy-preserving manner. Sources usually have to protect their information with respect to confidentiality, i.e. to take care to disclose information only to those clients who are entitled to see it. Clients may need to automatically verify that sources are certified to adhere to standardized, well-known privacy practices and procedures or that sources possess evidence proving that the sources are trustworthy and eligible.Trust management in distributed systems is one of the challenges that the security community is currently grappling with.This thesis proposes a unique framework of handling trust in web services. A Secure Trust Intermediary web Service (STIS) is proposed for deployment as a trust service platform in a distributed web services environment. Without a dependable intermediary process, enterprises are burdened with the problem of mapping security tokens from multiple sources. The main role played by the STIS architecture is to mediate between previously...