Distributed object middleware to support dependable information sharing between organisations

Organisations increasingly use the Internet to offer their own services and to utilise the services of others. This naturally leads to information sharing across organisational boundaries. However, despite the requirement to share information, the autonomy and privacy requirements of organisations must not be compromised. This demands the strict policing of inter-organisational interactions. Thus there is a requirement for dependable mechanisms for information sharing between organisations that do not necessarily trust each other. The paper describes the design of a novel distributed object middleware that guarantees both safety and liveness in this context. The safety property ensures that local policies are not compromised despite failures and/or misbehaviour by other parties. The liveness property ensures that, if no party misbehaves, agreed interactions will take place despite a bounded number of temporary network and computer related failures. The paper describes a prototype implementation with example applications.