Privacy Issues in Middleware for Service-oriented Applications

Privacy helps to establish personal autonomy and create individualism. Privacy is a state or condition of limited access to a person. In particular, information privacy relates to an individual´s right to determine how, when, and to what extent information about the self will be released to another person or to an organization. It can be said that privacy is a much broader concept than security; privacy protection is based on security protection. Security may enable privacy protection from authorized access, but security alone cannot provide privacy. Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) has recently gained a lot of attention both in industry and academic areas. However, its characteristics can not be easily solved using existing distributed computing technologies. The composition and interaction issues have been the central concerns because service-oriented applications are composed of autonomous, heterogeneous, and distributed processes. Middleware is thus proposed to serve as a solution to manage and provision service-oriented applications. Middleware is computer software that connects software components or applications in a distributed environment. Middleware includes different systems to support application development and delivery such as Web servers, application servers, and content management systems. To tackle the complexity of the interactions among services from various organizations, complex process requirements can be decomposed into different types of information flows, such as control, and data. This talk will give an overview of the research on privacy issues in this context and discuss the future research directions.