Policy-Driven Service Composition with Information Flow Control

Ensuring secure information flow is a critical task for service composition in multi-domain systems. Research in security-aware service composition provides some preliminary solutions to this problem, but there are still issues to be addressed. In this paper, we develop a service composition mechanism specifically focusing on the secure information flow control issues. We first introduce a general model for information flow control in service chains, considering the transformation factors of services and security classes of data resources in a service chain. Then, we develop general rules to guide service composition satisfying secure information flow requirements. Finally, to achieve efficient service composition, we develop a three-phase protocol to allow rapid filtering of candidate compositions that are unlikely to satisfy the information flow constraints and thorough evaluation of highly promising candidates. Our approach can achieve effective and efficient service composition considering secure information flow.