Electronic payment protocols provide secure service for electronic commerce transactions and protect private information from malicious entities in a network. Formal methods have been introduced to verify the security of electronic payment protocols; however, these methods concentrate on the accountability and fairness of the protocols, without considering the impact caused by timeliness. To make up for this deficiency, we present a formal method to analyze the security properties of electronic payment protocols, namely, accountability, fairness and timeliness. We add a concise time expression to an existing logical reasoning method to represent the event time and extend the time characteristics of the logical inference rules. Then, the Netbill protocol is analyzed with our formal method, and we find that the fairness of the protocol is not satisfied due to the timeliness problem. The results illustrate that our formal method can analyze the key properties of electronic payment protocols. Furthermore, it can be used to verify the time properties of other security protocols.

Recently, the Services Oriented Architectures (SOA) have been recognized as the key to the integration and interoperability of different applications and systems that coexist in an organization. However, even though the use of SOA has increased, some applications are unable to use it. That is the case of mission critical information applications, whose requirements such as high reliability, non-stop operation, high flexibility and high performance are not satisfied by conventional SOA infrastructures. In this article we present a novel approach of combining SOA with Autonomous Decentralized Systems (ADS) in order to provide an infrastructure that can satisfy those requirements. We have named this infrastructure Autonomous Decentralized Service Oriented Architecture (ADSOA). We present the concept and architecture of ADSOA, as well as the Loosely Couple Delivery Transaction and Synchronization Technology for assuring the data consistency and high reliability of the application. Moreover, a real implementation and evaluation of the proposal in a mission critical information system, the Uniqueness Verifying Public Key Infrastructure (UV-PKI), is shown in order to prove its effectiveness.

In recent years, society has experienced several changes in its ways and methods of consuming. Nowadays, the diversity and the customization of products and services have provoked that the consumer needs continuously change. Hence, the database systems support e-business processes are required to be timeliness and adaptable to the changing preferences. Autonomous Decentralized Database System (ADDS), has been proposed in order to satisfy the enhanced requirements of current on-line e-business applications. Autonomy and decentralization of subsystems help to achieve short response times in highly competitive situations and an autonomous Coordination Mobile Agent (CMA) has been proposed to achieve flexibility in a highly dynamic environment. However, a problem in ADDS is as the number of sites increases, the distribution and harmonization of product information among the sites are turning difficult. Therefore, many users cannot be satisfied quickly. As a result, system timeliness is inadequate. To solve this problem, a self configuration technology is proposed. This technology can configure the system to the evolving situation dynamically for achieving high response. A simulation shows the effectiveness of the proposed technology in a large-scale system. Finally, an implementation of this technology is presented.

The turn of the century is witnessing radical changes in the way information services are spreading due to the progress of IT and the constantly increase in the number of users of the WWW. Therefore, the business market is changing its strategy for a modern online business environment. Autonomous Decentralized Database System (ADDS), based on autonomous coordinating subsystems, has been proposed as a system architecture in order to meet the innovative e-business requirements for consistency and high response among distributed database systems. Autonomy and decentralization of subsystems help achieving high response time in highly competitive situation and autonomous Mobile Agent based coordination has been proposed to achieve flexibility in a highly dynamic environment. In this paper, it is analyzed the case in which the system size increases; and a multi agent coordination, the same number of mobile agents and sites coexist in the system, is proposed for achieving the timeliness property. The response time in the system is conformed by those transactions that require coordination and those that can be satisfied immediately. In accordance, the distribution of the data in the system for coordination is a medullar issue for the improvement of the response time. A trade-off exits between these two kind of transactions depending on the coordination of the Mobile Agents, the capacity of allocating data among the sites, and as well as the distribution of the data and user requests in the system. In this sense, since the system requires high response time, a data allocation technology in which each mobile agent autonomously determine its own capacity for adjusting data among the sites is proposed. Thus, the system will adapt itself to the dynamic environment. The effectiveness of the proposed architecture and technologies are evaluated by simulation.

Under dynamic and heterogenous environment, the need for adaptability and rapid response time to information service systems has become increasingly important. To cope with the continuously changing conditions of service provision and utilization, Faded Information Field (FIF) has been proposed, which is an agent-based distributed information service system architecture. In the case of a mono-service request, the system is designed to improve users' access time and preserve load balancing through the information structure. However, with interdependent requests of multi-service increasing, adaptability, reliability and timeliness have to be assured by the system. In this paper, the relationship between the timeliness and the reliability of correlated services allocation and access is clarified. Based on these factors, the autonomous network-based heterogeneous information services integration technology to provide one-stop service for users' multi-service requests is proposed. We proved the effectiveness of the proposed technology through the simulation and the results show that the integrated service can reduce the total users access time compared with the conventional systems.

The general public is expected to demand in not too distant future instituting more stringent certification procedures for computing parts of traditional and new-generation safety-critical application systems. Such quality-of-service (QoS) certification processes will not and can not rely solely on the testing approach. Design-time guaranteeing of timely service capabilities of various subsystems is an inevitable part of such processes. Although some promising developments in this area have been occurring in recent years, the technological challenges yet to be overcome are enormous. This paper is a summary of the author's perspective on the remaining challenges and promising directions for tackling them.