Security issues in contract-based computing

We propose a computational paradigm for service-oriented applications, where the interactions among services are driven by contracts. A contract is a commitment between two or more parties, which specifies the duties and the rights of the parties involved therein. We study the logical foundations of contracts, through an intuitionistic logic extended with a “contractual” form of implication. This logic is decidable, so we can mechanically infer the consequences deriving from any set of contracts. Several security issues can be explored, among which: how to detect when a contract is violated, how to single out the responsible of a violation, how to take countermeasures against violations. New research directions are then proposed to cope with these issues.