Semantic matching of web services security policies

The lack of semantics in WS-SecurityPolicy (WS-SP) hampers the effectiveness of matching security policies. To resolve this problem, we present a semantic approach for specifying and matching web service security policies. The approach consists in the transformation of WS-SP into an OWL-DL ontology and the definition of a set of rules which automatically generate semantic relations that can exist between the provider and requestor security requirements. We show how these relations lead to more correct and accurate matching of security policies. At the end of this paper, we present the implementation of our approach and its validation through a real-world use case.