High-value B2B interactions, non-repudiation and Web services

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the problem of making high-value business-to-business (B2B) interactions non-repudiable, where non-repudiation is the property that no party to an interaction can subsequently deny their involvement in the interaction. Existing approaches are discussed in the context of fundamental work on fairness and non-repudiation. The existing work suffers from a lack of flexibility both in terms of the mechanisms that can be deployed to achieve non-repudiation and of the interactions to which non-repudiation can be applied. The authors contend that it is necessary to be able to render arbitrary Web service interactions non-repudiable and to optionally invoke application-level validation of business messages at run-time. The chapter presents the design and implementation of a novel Web services-based middleware that addresses these requirements. The middleware leverages existing Web service standards. It is sufficiently flexible to adapt to different regulatory regimes and to provide security guarantees that are appropriate to different business contexts.