Abstract
The customary practice to regulate the functioning of services is to set terms & conditions. These are legal documents constraining the way services should be used and (sometimes) specifying what providers offer. In such documents it is not rare to find statements like
‘‘We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it’’ (notably, safety is not defined in [1]!)
I argue that —despite being a practical way out— this is far from being ideal. For instance, the lack of precise guarantees is a main deterrent for industries wishing to move their applications and business to the cloud. Quoting from [2],
‘‘Absent radical improvements in security technology, we expect that users will use contracts and courts, rather than clever security engineering, to guard against provider malfeasance.’’
The key point is that computer scientists and IT practitioners should strive for robust techniques and methodologies capable of specifying formal contracts amenable of verification.
I will overview some research recently carried out to address those issues.
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References
http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms (revision date June 8, 2012)
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Tuosto, E. (2013). Contract-Oriented Services. In: ter Beek, M.H., Lohmann, N. (eds) Web Services and Formal Methods. WS-FM 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7843. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38230-7_2
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