Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Service-based software systems can be compromised by potentially untrustworthy service requestors while providing services. Given that, it is important to identify and analyze the trust relationships between service providers and requestors, and incorporate them into service-based software. A trust model is required to appropriately quantify the trustworthiness of service requestors based on the analysis of service-based interactions. Although much research have been devoted to monitor service quality, to date, only very few approaches have been proposed to develop and automatically monitor service providing software from trust perspectives. In this project, we will utilize a trust-aware service-based software development framework to specify trust scenarios and incorporate the proposed trust model to calculate the trustworthiness of service requestors. A trust-based service granting mechanism will be used to decide whether a service requestor should be granted the requested service. A trust monitoring architecture will be proposed to deploy it in each service provider to monitor the granted services. The inherent nature of decentralization of service-based software introduces security concerns as the software maybe exploited due to potentially untrustworthy underlying networks on which the software run. Given that, our efforts for service software deployment environment or network design will be guided by two high level objectives: ubiquitous accountability and availability maintenance. As a network service provider, this research will help Bell Canada to stay one step ahead of the next wave of attackers by building and monitoring compromise resilient distributed service software. The major objective of this research proposal is to produce highly qualified professionals by providing valuable training facilities for building compromise resilient software.