I am presenting a discussion on SOA, S+S and Cloud computing later today at SOA Symposium . I have included the abstract for the talk and the slides that will be used in the presentation for anyone interested. Organizations evaluating Software + Services and Cloud Computing offerings must first...

I presented a discussion on SOA Security Patterns at the SOA Symposium today in Rotterdam. The abstract fro the talk is included below and the PPT is attached for anyone interested. Service-oriented solutions are distributed applications and therefore rely on many of the established security controls...

I am here at the PDC in Los Angeles having just watched Ray Ozzie and Bob Muglia finally present the next generation of Microsoft's Cloud Services / Software plus Services strategy with the release of our new operating system for the cloud "Azure"! Windows Azure was designed from the ground up for...

In my previous post I mentioned that we have now released a parser for SecPAL that allows policies to be written in a human readable simplified English grammar. I thought it might be worth including an example - based on the scenario that was used in the GridToday post on Access Control in Grid Computing...

One of the great strengths of SecPAL is its unique support for multiple representations of a security policy; XML for interoperability; and a simplified English grammar for human readbility. The SecPAL v1.1 Research Release (available from http://research.microsoft.com/projects/secpal) allows SecPAL...

Panos, from the University of Newcastle just dropped me a note to say that he is making progress with his Java based SecPAL implementation - which is very exciting. I noticed that he has moved away from XSB and has decided instead to create his own custom datalog implementation - which is very cool ...

The 20th IEEE Computer Security Foundations conference is underway in Venice at the moment, and our friends from Microsoft Research in Cambridge (Moritz Y. Becker, Cedric Fournet and Andrew D. Gordon) presented the first paper of the conference - based on their formal design for SecPAL. The paper "Design...

One question I hear a lot is "How does SecPAL compare with [InsertRandomSecurityTechnologyAcronymHere]?". Well the good news is that Marty Humphrey , Sang-Min Park, Jun Feng, Norm Beekwilder and Glenn Wasson from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia have been studying just...

A couple of people have remarked to us that they like the flexibility that SecPAL provides, but feel that it is difficult for people to get to grips with the API's when they first start evaluating SecPAL. For this reason Lonnie Wall (a consultant from RDA Corp ) has just released some sample C# source...

In my earlier post I showed how SecPAL could be used to grant access to a particular user based on a token issued by an STS that we explicitly established a trust relationship with using the SecPAL "canSay" predicate. Now I am going to show you something that I think is really cool - and something that...

I figured I would try to learn F# over this summer - and thought what better way to start than create a couple of SecPAL samples in F#. I thought this might help people that are interested in learning more about F# , or potentially F# users that are interested in learning more about how SecPAL can be...

Just a quick note to let everyone know that we have just released a minor update to our SecPAL library. In addition to a couple of minor bug fixes there are two features which I think you are really going to like. The first is an update to our grammar - making it much clearer what conditions and constraints...

One thing that always amazes me as I talk to scientists and researchers at shows like the recent Open Grid Forum or the last Super Computing conference is the extent to which they have managed to extend Eclipse to provide intuitive interfaces to their work. Up until very recently similar extensions for...

In my last post I promised to walk through a demonstration of SecPAL using a scenario that is challenging to implement using current technologies - but simple to implement using SecPAL. As timing would have it, rather than walking through the scenario in this blog, I can instead point you to an article...

It has probably been around 9 months since my last blog release where I described the release of our ASMX Service Factory. A lot has obviously happened since then - including the release of both WCF and the WCF Service Factory. So what have I been doing since that time? Well, around 9 months ago I...