Middleware support for non-repudiable business-to-business interactions

Abstract

The wide variety of services and resources available over the Internet presents new opportunities for organisations to collaborate to reach common goals. For example, business partners wish to access each other’s services and share information along the supply chain in order to compete more successfully in the delivery of goods or services to the ultimate customer. This can lead to the investment of significant resources by business partners in the resulting collaboration. In the context of such high value business-to-business (B2B) interactions it is desirable to regulate (monitor and control) the behaviour of business partners to ensure that they comply with agreements that govern their interactions. Achieving this regulation is challenging because, while wishing to collaborate, organisations remain autonomous and may not unguardedly trust each other. Two aspects must be addressed: (i) the need for high-level mechanisms to encode agreements (contracts) between the interacting parties such that they can be used for run-time monitoring and enforcement, and (ii) systematic support to monitor a given interaction for conformance with contract and to ensure accountability. This dissertation concerns the latter aspect — the definition, design and implementation of underlying middleware support for the regulation of B2B interactions. To this end, two non-repudiation services are identified — non-repudiable service invocation and non-repudiable information sharing. A flexible nonrepudiation protocol execution framework supports the delivery of the identified services. It is shown how the services can be used to regulate B2B interactions. The non-repudiation services provide for the accountability of the actions of participants; including the acknowledgement of actions, their run-time validation with respect to application-level constraints and logging for audit. The framework is realised in the context of interactions with and between components of a J2EE application server platform. However, the design is sufficiently flexible to apply to other common middleware platforms.