Towards a Trustworthy Service Marketplace for the Future Internet

Digital economy is moving towards offering advanced business services, integrated into different applications and consumed from heterogeneous devices. Considering the success of actual software marketplaces, it is possible to foresee that

Service Marketplaces

(SM) will play a key role for the future Internet of Services. At present, on all offered software, marketplace operators define requirements that are common, and are validated before admitting them. However, the requirements, the validation process, and its results are not completely evident to the service consumers, resulting in a significant shortcoming especially with respect to security characteristics. In addition, having common security requirements for all services and applications makes the validation possibly inadequate to address the specific requirements that consumers may have.

In order to address these points, we propose the concept of a

trustworthy service marketplace

for the upcoming Internet of Services, where the security characteristics of services are certified and treated as first-class entities, represented in a machine-processable format. This allows service consumers – either human end-users or computer agents – to reason about these security features and to match them with their specific security requirements.