Semantic similarity-based web services access control

Abstract

As the Semantic Web has been applied in the Web Services to integrate data across different applications with the increasing development of the Semantic Web technologies, it is essential to maintain the security of the organizations involved in the Semantic Web Services. Security is a crucial concern for commercial and mission critical applications in Web-based environments. To guarantee the security of the web services, security measures must be considered to protect against unauthorized disclosure, transfer, modification, or destruction, whether accidental or intentional. Access control is a kind of security measurements to guarantee the service processes, which is defined to allow resource owners to define, manage, and enforce the access conditions for each resource. In this paper, an ontological concept similarity algorithm is first proposed taking multiple concept relations into consideration. Then, an attribute based access control model based on the semantic similarity (SABAC, for short) is proposed to specify access control over attributes defined in domain ontologies. An experimental prototype and detailed empirical discussions are presented, and the method is validated in the framework of web service selection.