A Web Services Secure Conversation Establishment Protocol Based on Forwarded Trust

In large distributed monitoring and management systems that involve a large number of entities across multiple trust domains, the problem of establishing a secure conversation effectively between any two entities is outstanding when these two entities do not have a direct trust relationship. In this paper, we present a conversation establishment protocol that uses forwarded trust relationships to solve this problem. In this protocol, security assertion markup language (SAML) based authentication assertions are used to encapsulate the conversation context as well as the conversation target identity authentication information into a secure context token. Our protocol is conformant to the emerging Web services standards of WS-trust and WS-secure conversation. The implementation of this framework on Java platform and its application to secure a Web services based grid monitoring system are presented