Security for DAML web services: Annotation and matchmaking

In the next generation of the Internet semantic annotations will enable software agents to extract and interpret web content more quickly than it is possible with current techniques. The focus of this paper is to develop security annotations for web services that are represented in DAML-S and used by agents. We propose several security-related ontologies that are designed to represent well-known security concepts. These ontologies are used to describe the security requirements and capabilities of web services providers and requesting agents. A reasoning engine decides whether agents and web service have comparable security characteristics. Our prototypical implementation uses the Java Theorem Prover from Stanford for deciding the degree to which the requirements and capabilities match based on our matching algorithm. The security reasoner is integrated with the Semantic Matchmaker from CMU giving it the ability to provide security brokering between agents and services.