Managing conflict of interest in service composition

Abstract

Web services can be composed of other services in a highly dynamic manner. The existing role based authorization approaches have not adequately taken component services into account when managing access control for composite services. In this paper, we propose a service oriented conceptual model as an extension of role based access control that can facilitate the administration and management of access for service consumers as well as component services in composite web services. Various types of conflict of interest are identified due to the complicated relationships among service consumers and component services. A set of authorization rules are developed to prevent the conflict of interest. This research is a step forward to addressing the challenge in authorization in the context of composite web services. © Springer-Verlag 2010.