UML-SOA-Sec and Saleem's MDS Services Composition Framework for Secure Business Process Modelling of Services Oriented Applications

In Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment, a software application is a composition of services, which are scattered across enterprises and architectures. Security plays a vital role during the design, development and operation of SOA applications. However, analysis of today's software development approaches reveals that the engineering of security into the system design is often neglected. Security is incorporated in an ad-hoc manner or integrated during the applications development phase or administration phase or out sourced. SOA security is cross-domain and all of the required information is not available at downstream phases. The post-hoc, low-level integration of security has a negative impact on the resulting SOA applications. General purpose modeling languages like Unified Modeling Language (UML) are used for designing the software system; however, these languages lack the knowledge of the specific domain and "security" is one of the essential domains. A Domain Specific Language (DSL), named the "UML-SOA-Sec" is proposed to facilitate the modeling of security objectives along the business process modeling of SOA applications. Furthermore, Saleem's MDS (Model Driven Security) services composition framework is proposed for the development of a secure web service composition

Quality-aware model-driven service engineering

Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box character of services

Model Based Development of Quality-Aware Software Services

Modelling languages and development frameworks give support for functional and structural description of software architectures. But quality-aware applications require languages which allow expressing QoS as a first-class concept during architecture design and service composition, and to extend existing tools and infrastructures adding support for modelling, evaluating, managing and monitoring QoS aspects. In addition to its functional behaviour and internal structure, the developer of each service must consider the fulfilment of its quality requirements. If the service is flexible, the output quality depends both on input quality and available resources (e.g., amounts of CPU execution time and memory). From the software engineering point of view, modelling of quality-aware requirements and architectures require modelling support for the description of quality concepts, support for the analysis of quality properties (e.g. model checking and consistencies of quality constraints, assembly of quality), tool support for the transition from quality requirements to quality-aware architectures, and from quality-aware architecture to service run-time infrastructures. Quality management in run-time service infrastructures must give support for handling quality concepts dynamically. QoS-aware modeling frameworks and QoS-aware runtime management infrastructures require a common evolution to get their integration

Information standards to support application and enterprise interoperability for the smart grid

Copyright @ 2012 IEEE.Current changes in the European electricity industry are driven by regulatory directives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as replacing aged infrastructure and maintaining energy security. There is a wide acceptance of the requirement for smarter grids to support such changes and accommodate variable injections from renewable energy sources. However the design templates are still emerging to manage the level of information required to meet challenges such as balancing, planning and market dynamics under this new paradigm. While secure and scalable cloud computing architectures may contribute to supporting the informatics challenges of the smart grid, this paper focuses on the essential need for business alignment with standardised information models such as the IEC Common Information Model (CIM), to leverage data value and control system interoperability. In this paper we present details of use cases being considered by National Grid, the GB transmission system operator for information interoperability in pan-network system management and planning.This study is financially supported by the National Grid, UK

Why HTTPS is not Enough -- A Signature-Based Architecture for Trusted Content on the Social Web

Easy to use, interactive web applications accumulating data from heterogeneous sources represent a recent trend on the World Wide Web, referred to as the Social Web. There however, security standards are often disregarded in favor of interface design or brand new features. This prevents the new services from gaining ground in the enterprise, in medical or e-government environments. We propose the deployment of XML Digital Signatures on web content and demonstrate how an architecture enabling for various security properties would look like. The solution proposed will benefit from the research on security engineering in Service-Oriented Architectures and thus allows for an in-depth analysis on the results