An Ontology for Run-Time Verification of Security Certificates for SOA

Software systems are often certified to guarantee they satisfy particular functional or non-functional requirements, including safety, security or privacy. In this paper, we propose an approach based on the use of ontologies to support the description of the content of security certificates for services. The work frames in the scope of the ASSERT4SOA project, which investigates the way to dynamically search for services satisfying certain security requirements. The ASSERT4SOA Ontology, the main result of this work, supports the interoperability and comparison of heterogeneous certificates and the run-time verification of the compliance of services with the security requirements asserted in their certificates.