Trustworthy Coordination of Web Services Atomic Transactions

The Web Services Atomic Transactions (WS-AT) specification makes it possible for businesses to engage in standard distributed transaction processing over the Internet using Web Services technology. For such business applications, trustworthy coordination of WS-AT is crucial. In this paper, we explain how to render WS-AT coordination trustworthy by applying Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) techniques. More specifically, we show how to protect the core services described in the WS-AT specification, namely, the Activation service, the Registration service, the Completion service and the Coordinator service, against Byzantine faults. The main contribution of this work is that it exploits the semantics of the WS-AT services to minimize the use of Byzantine Agreement (BA), instead of applying BFT techniques naively, which would be prohibitively expensive. We have incorporated our BFT protocols and mechanisms into an open-source framework that implements the WS-AT specification. The resulting BFT framework for WS-AT is useful for business applications that are based on WS-AT and that require a high degree of dependability, security, and trust.