A service oriented infrastructure to facilitate trust in collaborative working

There is currently a significant interest in the use of a pay-per-use charging model for using software services. A primary concern for a software or resource owner when considering this approach to software exposure is security, and in particular – trust. The resource owner must be confident in the knowledge that users accessing their software have fine-grained access restrictions applied to them controlling the varying levels of access to the software a user may be granted. Similarly, a client executing a service on a remote site must trust the administrator of the site to deliver a timely and accurate result (and possibly proprietary data sent to the site). Existing Virtual Organisation (VO) management tools use centralized servers that handle role management, user authentication and access control, essentially this is the trusted centre of a VO. Resource owners trust this central server and its manager to allow access to their machines and resources based on role privileges assigned within the VO. In this paper, it is proposed that a distributed and automated software management application based on a service oriented infrastructure would allow software owners to provide a Web Services interface to their own software, suggesting an alternative and distributed approach to role based management across organisational boundaries