An Architecture to Support the Invocation of Personal Services in Web Interactions

TL;DR

This paper introduces an architecture enabling web service providers to invoke personal services on the client side through a dedicated broker, enhancing interactions like content handling and user authentication, demonstrated with an electronic ID card.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel architecture and agent-based broker system for invoking personal services from web providers, distinct from traditional plugins.

Findings

Successfully implemented the architecture and proxy system.

Demonstrated personal authentication using electronic ID cards.

Enhanced web interaction capabilities with personal services.

Abstract

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