Reasoning about policies in security-aware service discovery using answer set programming

In order to enable a secure interaction between dynamically discovered software services and the client's application in a cooperative information system such as service oriented system, one of the pre-requisites is the reconciliation of service-specific security policies of all stakeholders. Existing service discovery research does not address the issue of enormous search space in finding security-aware services based on preferred security policy alternatives of the client of software services. In this paper, we propose an answer set programming (ASP) approach, drawn from the field of artificial intelligence (AI), to explore a viable solution of finding security-aware services for the client. We argue that the ASP approach can significantly reduce the search space and achieve great performance gains. We use ASP to: (i) specify security policies including expressing service-specific security preference weighting and importance scoring in quantifiable terms; and (ii) reason about the compliance between the security policies of the client and the software service.