Creating a Directory protocol specification for networked services

Abstract

Technological and economical developments create new market opportunities for networked services. Many of these opportunities are addressed, however for many new developments the infrastructure is reinvented while these services have similar infrastructural requirements. This reinvention of infrastructures is a costly activity; hence there exists a need for standardization and reuse. Innopay has recognized this need and set out to create the SIX standards (1) that must provide standardized building blocks for schemed networked service infrastructures; thus reducing the costs of infrastructure development and allowing the service developers to direct their focus to innovation in the application domain. Two important building blocks for such an infrastructure are a secure and reliable messaging interface and a directory protocol. For service providers in the network to securely and reliably exchange messages, a method is needed to exchange information for identification, addressing and authentication. The research documented in this report provides a solution for this data distribution problem. The primary result includes a specification based on ebXML RS/RIM (2) of a protocol for configuration and operation of a directory and the interaction of users with the directory.