Byzantine Fault Tolerant Coordination for Web Services Business Activities

In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on the threats towards the coordination services for Web services business activities and explore the most optimal solution to mitigate such threats. A careful analysis of the state model of the coordination services reveals that it is sufficient to use a lightweight Byzantine fault tolerance algorithm that avoids performing expensive total ordering of all request messages. The algorithm and the associated mechanisms have been incorporated into an open-source framework implementing the standard Web services business activity specification and an extension protocol that enables the separation of the coordination tasks from the business logic. The performance evaluation results obtained using the working prototype confirm the optimality of our solution.