Enabling Usage Control through Reputation Objects: A Discussion on e-Commerce and the Internet of Services Environments

This paper discusses the meaning and the role of Trust and Reputation in Internet-of-Service and e-Commerce environments following a comparative case study. Both environments represent paradigms through which the Internet is seen as a huge infrastructure where electronic services or real products are traded on. In comparison to electronic commerce, participating in an Internet-of-Services can be full of risks for all participants. Even well known security mechanisms are not able to close all gaps of access and usage control. This paper discusses the concepts of trust and reputation and brings to light the relation between these concepts to security mechanisms, Service-Level-Agreements, and quality measurements in order to enable Usage Control. The proposed solution is based on our previous model of reputation objects. The discussion also introduces a new concept of what we call reputation auditing where quality processes are considered part of reputation management not the other way around.