Component middleware to support non-repudiable service interactions

The wide variety of services and resources available over the Internet presents new opportunities to create value added, inter-organisational composite services (CSs)from multiple existing services. To preserve their autonomy and privacy, each organisation needs to regulate access both to their services and to shared information within the CS. Key mechanisms to facilitate such regulated interactions are the collection and verification of non-repudiable evidence of the actions of the parties to the CS. The paper describes how component-based middleware can be enhanced to support non-repudiable service invocation and information sharing. A generic implementation, based on a J2EE application server, is presented.