Web services for rural areas-Security challenges in development and use

Web services (WS) are the modern response of traders and online service providers to satisfying the increasing needs and demands of the digital communities. WS formation and operation is based on a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Security is of paramount importance to WS and the ability to measure and evaluate the level of security available is key to establishing and continuing to develop the level of trust based on reputation developed by the provider of the WS. The greatest challenge in offering secure WS is to groups of people where the level of expertise of the user is low and the need for transparency of the service provision quite high, such as the case with services offered primarily to people in rural areas. Providers of such services face many challenges in balancing the requirements for performance, interoperability, and security against the cost of implementing secure systems and running profitable operations through low income generating WS. A review of services offered, of the users and the challenges in building online trust among providers and users are discussed for the case of rural areas in the United Kingdom. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Web services security evaluation considerations

Web services development is a key theme in utilisation of the commercial exploitation of the semantic web. Paramount to the development and offering of such services is the issue of security features and the way these are applied in instituting trust amongst participants and recipients of the service. Implementing such security features is a major challenge to developers as they need to balance these with performance and interoperability requirements. Being able to evaluate the level of security offered is a desirable feature for any prospective participant. The authors attempt to address the issues of security requirements and evaluation criteria, while they discuss the challenges of security implementation through a simple web service application case

Web services for rural areas—Security challenges in development and use

Web services (WS) are the modern response of traders and online service providers to satisfying the increasing needs and demands of the digital communities. WS formation and operation is based on a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Security is of paramount importance to WS and the ability to measure and evaluate the level of security available is key to establishing and continuing to develop the level of trust based on reputation developed by the provider of the WS. The greatest challenge in offering secure WS is to groups of people where the level of expertise of the user is low and the need for transparency of the service provision quite high, such as the case with services offered primarily to people in rural areas. Providers of such services face many challenges in balancing the requirements for performance, interoperability, and security against the cost of implementing secure systems and running profitable operations through low income generating WS. A review of services offered, of the users and the challenges in building online trust among providers and users are discussed for the case of rural areas in the United Kingdom

Participant Domain Name Token Profile for security enhancements supporting service oriented architecture

This research proposes a new secure token profile for improving the existing Web Services security standards. It provides a new authentication mechanism. This additional level of security is important for the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is an architectural style that uses a set of principles and design rules to shape interacting applications and maintain interoperability. Currently, the market push is towards SOA, which provides several advantages, for instance: integration with heterogeneous systems, services reuse, standardization of data exchange, etc. Web Services is one of the technologies to implement SOA and it can be implemented using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). A SOAP-based Web Service relies on XML for its message format and common application layer protocols for message negotiation and transmission. However, it is a security challenge when a message is transmitted over the network, especially on the Internet. The Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced a set of Web Services Security standards that focus on two major areas. “Who” can use the Web Service and “What” are the permissions. However, the location or domain of the message sender is not authenticated. Therefore, a new secure token profile called: Participant Domain Name Token Profile (PDNT) is created to tackle this issue. The PDNT provides a new security feature, which the existing token profiles do not address. Location-based authentication is achieved if adopting the PDNT when using Web Services. In the performance evaluation, PDNT is demonstrated to be significantly faster than other secure token profiles. The processing overhead of using the PDNT with other secure token profiles is very small given the additional security provided. Therefore all the participants can acquire the benefits of increased security and performance at low cost

Towards secure web services: Performance analysis, decision making and steganography approaches

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Web services provide a platform neutral and programming language independent technology that supports interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Clients and other systems interact with Web services using a standardised XML messaging system, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialisation in conjunction with other related Web standards. Nevertheless, the idea of applications from different parties communicating together raises a security threat. The challenge of Web services security is to understand and consider the risks of securing a Web-based service depending on the existing security techniques and simultaneously follow evolving standards in order to fill the gap in Web services security. However, the performance of the security mechanisms is fraught with concerns due to additional security contents in SOAP messages, the higher number of message exchanges to establish trust, as well as the extra CPU time to process these additions. As the interaction between service providers and requesters occurs via XML-based SOAP messages, securing Web services tends to make these messages longer than they would be otherwise and consequently requires interpretation by XML parsers on both sides, which reduces the performance of Web services. The work described in this thesis can be broadly divided into three parts, the first of which is studying and comparing the performance of various security profiles applied on a Web service tested with different initial message sizes. The second part proposes a multi-criteria decision making framework to aid Web services developers and architects in selecting the best suited security profile that satisfies the different requirements of a given application during the development process in a systematic, manageable, and effective way. The proposed framework, based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach, incorporates not only the security requirements, but also the performance considerations as well as the configuration constraints of these security profiles. The framework is then validated and evaluated using a scenario-driven approach to demonstrate situations where the decision making framework is used to make informed decisions to rank various security profiles in order to select the most suitable one for each scenario. Finally, the last part of this thesis develops a novel steganography method to be used for SOAP messages within Web services environments. This method is based on changing the order of XML elements according to a secret message. This method has a high imperceptibility; it leaves almost no trail because it uses the communication protocol as a cover medium, and keeps the structure and size of the SOAP message intact. The method is empirically validated using a feasible scenario so as to indicate its utility and value

Towards secure web services : performance analysis, decision making and steganography approaches

Web services provide a platform neutral and programming language independent technology that supports interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. Clients and other systems interact with Web services using a standardised XML messaging system, such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialisation in conjunction with other related Web standards. Nevertheless, the idea of applications from different parties communicating together raises a security threat. The challenge of Web services security is to understand and consider the risks of securing a Web-based service depending on the existing security techniques and simultaneously follow evolving standards in order to fill the gap in Web services security. However, the performance of the security mechanisms is fraught with concerns due to additional security contents in SOAP messages, the higher number of message exchanges to establish trust, as well as the extra CPU time to process these additions. As the interaction between service providers and requesters occurs via XML-based SOAP messages, securing Web services tends to make these messages longer than they would be otherwise and consequently requires interpretation by XML parsers on both sides, which reduces the performance of Web services. The work described in this thesis can be broadly divided into three parts, the first of which is studying and comparing the performance of various security profiles applied on a Web service tested with different initial message sizes. The second part proposes a multi-criteria decision making framework to aid Web services developers and architects in selecting the best suited security profile that satisfies the different requirements of a given application during the development process in a systematic, manageable, and effective way. The proposed framework, based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach, incorporates not only the security requirements, but also the performance considerations as well as the configuration constraints of these security profiles. The framework is then validated and evaluated using a scenario-driven approach to demonstrate situations where the decision making framework is used to make informed decisions to rank various security profiles in order to select the most suitable one for each scenario. Finally, the last part of this thesis develops a novel steganography method to be used for SOAP messages within Web services environments. This method is based on changing the order of XML elements according to a secret message. This method has a high imperceptibility; it leaves almost no trail because it uses the communication protocol as a cover medium, and keeps the structure and size of the SOAP message intact. The method is empirically validated using a feasible scenario so as to indicate its utility and value.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo