7 - E-services security

Summary

The Internet is growing to become the major means through which the services can be delivered electronically to businesses and customers. System vendors and service providers are pushing toward the definition of protocols, languages, and tools that support the improvement, use, and operation of electronic services. The main goal of the e-service paradigm is to provide the opportunity for defining value-added composite services by integrating other basic or composite services. However, security issues need to be addressed within such an open environment.

Introduction

The notion of service is getting increasingly valuable to many fields of communications and information technology. Nowadays, the current development in service provision through communication networks are moving from tightly joined systems towards services of loosely linked and dynamically related components. The major evolution in this category of applications is a new paradigm, called e-service, for which project developers and service providers are pushing for the definition of techniques, methods, and tools as well as infrastructures for supporting the design, development, and operation of e-services. Also, standards bodies are urging to specify protocols and languages to help the deployment in e-services.

E-services are self-contained and modular applications. They can be accessed via Internet and can provide a set of useful functionalities to businesses and individuals. Particularly, recent approaches to e-business typically view an e-service as an abstraction of a business process, in the sense that it represents an activity executed within an organization on behalf of a customer or another organization.