Inter-enterprise contract architecture for open distributed systems: security requirements

An important element of electronic inter-enterprise interactions is support for a rapid and cost-effective establishment of contracts, monitoring of parties’ performance to the contract and possible enforcement capability. We have previously developed a business contract architecture to address these requirements [6,7]. This paper presents an extension of the earlier work. The concept of binding is used to describe the interactions between the components of the contract architecture so that standard contract sequences can be stored in a public repository for future reuse. Various security requirements of the architecture are identified, from the application and distributed infrastructure perspectives. It is then shown how a secure contract architecture can be derived to address these requirements.