Yuhichi Nakamura

Best-practice patterns and tool support for configuring secure Web services messaging

This paper presents an emerging tool for security configuration of service-oriented architectures with Web Services. Security is a major concern when implementing mission-critical business transactions and such concern motivated the development of Web Services Security (WS-Security). However, the existing tools for configuring the security properties of Web Services give a technology-oriented view, and only assist in choosing the data to encrypt and selecting an encryption algorithm. The users must construct their own mental models of how the security configurations actually relate to business policies. In contrast, the tool described here gives a simplified, business-policy-oriented view. It models the messaging with customers and business partners, lists various threats, and presents best-practice security patterns against the threats. A user can select among variations on the basic patterns according to the business policies, and then apply them to the messaging model through the GUI. The result of the pattern application is described in the Web Services Security Policy Language (WS-Security Policy).

Architecture and performance evaluation of a massive multi-agent system

Multi-agent systems can be viewed as systems in which large numbers of agents process jobs by interacting with each other. We have been applying such a multi-agent system to electronic commerce (EC) on the Internet since December 1997. Since the server on the system has to host thousands of agents that process jobs in a disorderly manner, the mechanism for controlling the memory and CPU occupied by agents is very important. Moreover, the system can be extended to include multiple servers connected via a local area network (LAN) or the Internet. We have used mobile agent technology to extend such systems, and therefore the control mechanism supports agent mobility. In this paper, we describe a mechanism for controlling the use of memory and the CPU by thousands of agents. The results of a performance evaluation are also given.