Toward Trustworthy Service Consumers and Producers

The purpose of this research is to propose a mechanism that enables trustworthy relationships among service producers and consumers. Service producers advertise their services through the UDDI. From a QoS perspective, a service consumer needs to know if a service will meet his or her requirements for which various web services are contracted. In terms of a security perspective, a service consumer that obtains services for which they are unable to pay establishes a security concern for service producers. The requirement of the secure quality of services for Web services (S-QoS4WS) needs a mechanism to enable service consumers and producers to establish trust in their prospective partners prior to engaging in any service for which payment or quality of service is required. For this purpose, we propose a S-QoS4WS approach that utilizes 'PublisherAssertion' tags within the UDDI to satisfy security and QoS issues. This approach makes use of existing mechanisms within UDDI version 3 to resolve current issues involving trust and non-repudiation.