Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) represents the guiding principle in current applications development, which aims at improving architecture flexibility, integration with existing applications and data integration. Traditional infrastructure technologies fail to meet the new needs posed by SOA-compliant applications and the continuously growing requirements for availability, flexibility and scalability. In providing infrastructure resources by means of services, Service Oriented Infrastructures (SOI) can fill the gap and provide a basis for the realisation of SOA. One approach to SOI is the Grid, which has recently advanced from supporting high-performance applications to enabling complex collaborations among various users and systems of different expertise and differing levels of authorisation.

In addition to the research community, both commercial and industrial sectors have shown interest in adopting Grid solutions as a way of improving service provision and business agility and of increasing profitability. The Grid offers the infrastructure required for efficiently adopting SOA solutions by aggregating and co-ordinating various resources ranging from computing power and storage to applications and human expertise, serving users with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements.

Any collaboration involves interactions, knowledge sharing and information exchange. In a SOI environment this collaboration is translated into access and control of resources that may be heterogeneous, dynamic, geographically dispersed, self-autonomic, may have complex dependencies, and may belong to various security domains with different policies governing access control and security.

Given the nature of business processes and collaborations, security is of paramount importance to the implementation of SOI. However, the distributed nature of access to and management of resources raises many concerns in identity management: confidentiality, data protection and privacy, traceability, non-repudiation, integrity, access control, trust and policy enforcement. Indeed, considerable barrier to the adoption of Grid solutions in the public and private sectors lies in possible breaches of security and privacy and their implications: social, economic, legal and organizational. Better understanding of these implications could enable a wider adoption of SOI.

This Call for Papers seeks research on SOI from all these perspectives. Topics for this special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Secure SOA-based/Grid-based Enterprise Architectures
• Security and Privacy issues in SOI
• User management in Grid Portals
• Mobile Identity Management
• Privacy-preserving techniques
• Trust Models and Trust Establishment
• Security as Quality of Service (QoS)
• Business models for Grids
• Models for authentication and privacy management in SOI
• Identity-related scientific, business, industrial, legal and social implications of SOI
• Audit and accountability in SOI
• Futuristic SOA/Grid Business/Social Scenarios (e.g., law enforcement, supply chain management, e-Science, e-commerce, etc.)

For more information you can visit http://www.springer.com/computer/programming/journal/12394