An Architecture to Support the Invocation of Personal Services in Web Interactions
This addresses the need for more flexible client-side service interactions in web applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing HTTP and browser technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling web service providers to invoke personal services from a browser by proposing an architecture with a Broker agent, and demonstrates its implementation for authentication using an eID card.
This paper proposes an architecture to enable Web service providers to interact with personal services. Personal services are vanilla HTTP services that are invoked from a browser, upon a request made by a service Provider, to deliver some service on the client side, i.e., on an execution environment defined by the browser's user. Personal services can be used both to handle content manipulation and presentation or to deliver request-response interactions with different goals (e.g. user authentication). Unlike plugins, that are described to service providers on each and every HTTP request, personal services are explicitly searched by service providers using a novel agent, a Broker, that works in close cooperation with each browser. We have implemented this architecture and implemented an HTTP proxy to cope with it. For demonstration purposes we show how we can use personal services for personal authentication with an electronic identification (eID) card