A Contract-Based Accountability Service Model

As growing number of real-world activities are performed through Internet connected services, there are increasing needs to make the behaviors of both service consumer and provider accountable. Many efforts attempting to regulate services and to guarantee service qualities lack sufficient accountability support. This paper treats accountability as a service and proposes a novel contract-based accountability service model to tackle this problem. The model uses federated accountability services to audit interactions between service consumers and service providers so that misbehaviors can be detected with undeniable evidences. We show how Internet data management services can be made accountable using this service model. We implemented the data management service and characterized its performance.