Joris Claessens

Web services and web service security standards

This paper provides a short introduction to basic web services concepts and describes in greater detail the various specifications related to reliability, transactions and in particular security which are referred to as the Microsoft/IBM WS-^* family of specifications. The authors were not involved in the development and specification of the family of WS-^* specs described in this paper.

RACE: real-time applications over cloud-edge

The Cloud-Edge topology - where multiple smart edge devices such as phones are connected to one another via the Cloud - is becoming ubiquitous. We demonstrate RACE, a novel framework and system for specifying and efficiently executing distributed real-time applications in the Cloud-Edge topology. RACE uses LINQ for StreamInsight to succinctly express a diverse suite of useful real-time applications. Further, it exploits the processing power of edge devices and the Cloud to partition and execute such queries in a distributed manner. RACE features a novel cost-based optimizer that efficiently finds the optimal placement, minimizing global communication cost while handling multi-level join queries and asymmetric network links.

Toward Web Services Profiles for Trust and Security in Virtual Organisations

The rise in practical Virtual Organisations (VOs) requires secure access to data and interactions between their partners. Ad hoc solutions to meet these requirements are possible, but Web services hold out the potential for generic security solutions whose cost can be spread across several short lived dynamic VOs. This paper identifies trust and security requirements throughout the VO lifecycle and analyse current Web Services specifications to show their suitability to meet these requirements. Although they demonstrate the potential for generic security support, there are uncertainties concerning different level of interoperability and stability of implementation for different specifications, which may slow down their exploitation for security-critical business applications. However, research in Web services developments are well timed to avoid losing first adopter advantage when they become stable.