No abstract

Services provided by organizations and public administration to end users, are based, in most of the cases, in accurate user identification. This identification can be done, among other possibilities, through the use of digital certificates. Certification Authorities (CA) are the organizations that provide information about the certificates' state to the Validation Authorities that are the organizations responsible for the validation of the information about user's certificate. Because the validation of a digital certificate will be a key element in users identification, it is cautious to use several Validation Authorities (VA), choosing one of them in each case a validation is needed. In this paper we approach the mechanism of service provider selection under the point of view of Anticipation and Incursion. In this case we consider the selection of the Validation Authority that provides the validation service as a selection process in which the system makes decisions according to the current state, the previous states, a set of specific parameters and the future state, that is to say, it is an Incursive System. Furthermore, as long as there are several Validation Authorities, we can consider that we are dealing with a hyperincursive system with several possible states to be reached.