Peer-to-Peer Delegation for Accessing Web Services

Hierarchical collaborations between cooperative, rational agents are quite naturally achieved through goal delegation. In the context of a service-oriented architecture, agents responsible for workflow management can subdivide their goals in sub-goals, generate a utility function from each sub-goal and set up a negotiation process with the agents associated to one or more Web services and responsible for the interaction with them. However, such delegations cannot come into effect unless they are associated with a corresponding delegation of privileges, which are needed to access some resources and achieve desired goals. In this paper we present a security mechanism for SOAP‑style and REST-style Web services that allows the distribution of the delegation of access rights among different services and clients.