Improving Interoperability of Digital Certificates for Software & Services

Software certification has been successfully used with traditional "static" software. With the introduction of new computing paradigms such as service-oriented computing and cloud computing, the existing way to represent software certifications based in verbose human-oriented documents, exhibits many limitations, to the point of making the approach not useful in practice. The ASSERT4SOA project is currently addressing this problem and has developed a computer-oriented representation for software certifications based on a new type of digital certificates called ASSERT. However, in order to be able to represent the huge heterogeneity of certification schemes and standards, the ASSERT specification has to be extremely flexible and rather complex. This in turn, makes the production of ASSERTs difficult, and moreover, limits their interoperability, as to be interoperable, ASSERTS need to follow certain rules. This paper presents the solution adopted in the project in order to improve the interoperability of independently produced ASSERTS. The solution has been evaluated and has received very positive feedback.