Accountability for Service Compliance

Abstract

In recent years, a range of innovations in the ‘service’ related technologies have been witnessed, namely SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Meanwhile, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables composing different services seamlessly to form new service network. The combination of the two trends allow individual organizations to overcome their limitation of computing resources and obtain the maximum value of the functionality themselves can provide. One major issue with such massive composition is to verify the compliance of participating entities. Composed services usually span several administrative domains, where each has its own priorities. Given the fact that an admission to a violation may cause penalties, it is conceivable that an entity may intend to deceive. To tackle this issue, ‘accountability’ has emerged as a promising concept to achieve system trustworthiness. Recently, accountability has received considerable attention in research communities, and many approaches have been proposed. In this survey, the authors discuss the concept and desirable properties of accountability, clarify the requirements and differences that distinguish accountability to other related approaches, and systematically summarize and evaluate various approaches of accountability.