A Security Meta-Language for SOAP Messaging
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Due to the increasing availability of competing service providers and the decreasing costs of moving services online recent trends in information systems development direct focus towards leveraging complex distributed system interconnections. To that end service-oriented architectures and web services have become commonplace in busi- ness and government application development because they facilitate rapid development and deployment through the use of standards that document interfaces and the message exchanges. However, the hierarchically related standards have complex documented interconnections and dependencies. The configuration of the services and the messages they exchange must adhere to the mandates established in these documents, yet the guidance offered by each specification is often too expansive for software developers to understand without assistance. Incorrect configurations can lead to messaging configurations that result in software vulnerabilities, system unavailability, service disruption, and ultimately loss of protected information. In this paper, we devise a Security Meta Language for secure web service communication based on a dynamic modeling framework. The framework models expert knowledge gathered from the intensive analysis of message protection protocols specified in web service standards. We outline a process to create and modify secure messaging directives through a case study investigating X.509 PKI tokens and digital signatures for SOAP communication.Keywords:
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When using web services, it is important to define in advance policies that will apply to interactions with a given web service. These policies can define requirements such as security protocols to be used, expected degree of security or reliability, or other business rules that apply to the specific web service. The WS-Policy standard from W3C provides architecture to define policies and structures, and means to enforce them. This is a complex standard and we express it as a pattern to facilitate its use by designers and users of web services. This pattern is part of a catalog of patterns for web services standards being currently developed.
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Protecting (authorizing) access to individual web services has been explored in many research efforts. The focus of such research is to ensure that authorized users with appropriate credentials are able to access resources under controlled and authorized security. However, integrating and/or composing such services, e.g. through workflow environments in collaborative environments, remains an open challenge. A key issue is to ensure the security requirements of each individual service and hence their service provider, whilst still allowing them to be used as part of a workflow execution - potentially by users with diverse security credentials. The aim of this research is to provide a security-oriented workflow framework that supports such secure workflow enactment. The framework supports a variety of security evaluation mechanisms using diverse security credential aggregation mechanisms leveraging centralized and decentralized security with push/pull of security information as required. We describe the core components of this framework and how they can be used to support security-oriented workflow enactment.
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Service composition is a fundamental technique for developing web-service applications. In general, a single service is not enough to achieve the user’s goal, rather several services, often from different providers, are composed dynamically to satisfy a request. Ensuring security in such a system is challenging and not supported by most of the security frameworks proposed in current literature. This paper presents a formal model for composing security policies dynamically to cope with changes in requirements or occurrences of events. The model can be used to specify the security policies of web-services and to reason about their composition. We illustrate our approach with a simple example from healthcare services.
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User management services were one of the first to be offloaded to third party cloud vendors. Today, a large number of service providers rely on trusted identity providers for managing users and their resources. At the core of these interactions involving multiple providers are a set of web-based workflows that have emerged as de-facto standards. Establishing correctness of such web protocols is of immense importance to a large number of common business transactions on the web. Designing cryptographic protocols is known to be highly error-prone due to the complex environment in which they must succeed. Thus not surprisingly web protocols that are additionally exposed to web-browser based attacks have proven to be even more challenging to design. This thesis aims to advance techniques for cryptographic protocol analysis by proposing a framework that is especially designed for analyzing security of web protocols. To analyze trust between collaborating service providers on the web, we extend the wellknown BAN logic. We include new primitives and inference rules which aid and simplify analysis of web protocols. In order to keep the complexity of the logic within reasonable limits, we also propose a hybrid approach based on augmenting belief logic analysis with a second stage that establishes secrecy properties through model checking. We illustrate the use of these approaches through analysis of several important web protocols. Not only does our analyses identify known issues, but we discover issues that have previously gone unnoticed.
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Web Services are an emerging facet of Service Oriented Architecture and have promised to address the challenging issue of application integration. Web Services, as a concept, have been developed in order to build and create distributed software applications. These services have many advantages such as, the interoperability between heterogeneous applications, and the ability to design and launch these services regardless of platform, programming language or operating system. For enterprises and academic establishments this is advantageous in a number of ways. It has become apparent however that Web Services face many diverse challenges which are preventing the technology from truly being adopted. Many industries such as defence and critical infrastructure have become increasingly interested in the use of Web Services but in order for them to play an integral part in today’s society, an array of issues must first be addressed. We believe that as an issue, trust can be considered as one of the main technological barriers currently facing Web Services, in particular, trust challenges such as reliability and security. By implementing Web Services into systems that rely on having high standards of reliability and security, trust needs to be guaranteed between the provider and the consumer. One way to help provide assurance for this is to provide adequate means of testing. At its core, testing is the process of executing a program with the intent of finding errors to ensure whether a system is functioning as intended. This can involve activities such as specifying test cases, generating test data, monitoring test execution, measuring test coverage, validating test results and tracking system errors. In recent years, research on testing Web Services and Web Service compositions has been gaining much attention and is growing at a rapid pace. Testing is vital in any environment to help ensure a degree of trust. While there are many issues facing Service Oriented Architecture and in particular, Web Service technology, the trust challenge is a particularly critical issue which needs to be addressed. This paper outlines current research for the effective means of testing Web Services, online and in the cloud computing environment. We aim to provide means for Web Services to be composed and tested in real time, over the cloud, utilising test case generation methods and Oracle decision making. By testing Web Services and ensuring their functionality, we can provide a degree of trust to the service consumer, that the Service they are requesting is available and will function as intended. We have detailed the importance of Service testing and the reason for why it should be considered as an immediate issue to address.
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Recently, the trend in information systems has shifted towards the interconnection of complex distributed systems due to the increasing availability of competing service providers and the decreasing costs of moving services online. To that end service oriented architectures with web services have become commonplace in business and government application development. Web services facilitate application implementation and deployment through the use of standards that clearly document interfaces and the message exchanges. However, the reliance on these standards has become problematic and cumbersome, especially when configuring secure systems that require explicit message properties. The standards are highly interconnected and hierarchical in nature, and correctly establishing their configuration is problematic due to the massive amounts of data that must be reviewed prior to implementation. Incorrect specifications can lead to disastrous application configurations resulting in software vulnerabilities, system unavailability and service disruption, and ultimately loss of secure protected information. The goal of this work is a reusable framework in the form of a meta-language to model secure SOAP messages. In this paper we define a Security Meta Language (SML) as a two-part model and dynamic process that documents the security relevant portions of the standards for their consistent, comprehensive, and correct application. The language contains a static portion that grounds the model in the web service standards using their documentation and data structures, and a dynamic portion that catalogs different security controls as they are applied to SOAP messages. We outline a dynamic reusable process to add new directives to the database when application requirements change or new security concerns are found. We overview all UML stereotypes and present a case study that demonstrates the correct use of the SML to guide secure message configuration in a distributed system environment.
SOAP
Security Testing
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The design, development and implementation of electronic (e-) services relying on XML and Web Service (WS)-based technologies is the current trend in achieving interoperability. Eservices can be offered either as autonomous Web Services or embedded in Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) (High et al., 2005). In this context, despite the fact that applications with similar business goals adopt the same technical standards, quite often their interactions capabilities are extremely limited. Thus, application developers show an increasing concern for evaluating interoperability between common services which are offered either autonomously or through a SOA. The creation of a proper framework (EIF) has a significant importance in the evaluation of interoperability of such services and is accomplished by the precise definition of the applied standards and guidelines which guarantee the interaction of the services. Existing testing methodologies developed by various organizations (e.g ISO/IEC 9646, ESTI) treat the interoperability of services as a generic problem. They merely provide guidelines and describe high level testing procedures that can be applied to test interoperability of various telecommunication as well as software and data communication systems. Most Web Service-oriented methodologies (i.e. WS-I, ebXML IIC framework) demonstrate weaknesses as they are not capable of testing all the required aspects that compose an interoperability framework and mostly the security aspects of the message content. Additionally, in literature, specific testing types (Saglietti et al., 2008) have been presented defining diverse testing approaches that treat the applications under test either as white boxes having full knowledge of the software or as black boxes without any understanding of their internal behaviour or even as grey boxes with limited knowledge of their internal architecture. The nature the WSs (e.g. geographic distribution of the examined WSs and dependencies with external trusted third parties) plays an important role in the adoption of the most appropriate testing type as they raise specific challenges that should be underlined and taken into account. Therefore, there is a specific need for targeted methodologies and frameworks that check and guarantee the end-to-end application interaction capabilities of common Web Services and follow and deploy the most appropriate testing strategies covering all WSs aspects. Identifying this need, this paper proposes a well-formed grey box testing methodology 35
Conformance testing
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This paper presents a tool for testing the security of web service frameworks. The tool implements a large set of attack types, defined based on previous security research studies, existing testing tools, and field experience. The motivation is that developers frequently build web services based on the assumption that the underlying frameworks are secure, which is not always the case. Despite the evident need for security in the platforms that support services, existing security testing tools are very limited. In practice, most tools focus on application level vulnerabilities, and the few that allow testing platforms implement a very limited set of attack types. To the best of our knowledge, our tool includes more attacks than any other existing tool. Furthermore, by implementing an extensible architecture (based on plug-ins), the tool can be easily extended with additional attacks, supporting also a large variety of testing configurations. Results show that it can be used to disclose critical security problems in well-known frameworks.
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While on the surface the combination of software components that adhere to associated standards should lead to rapid and successful system implementation. However, issues can arise when integrating independently defined software subsystems. Here conflicts are discussed that arose when integrating elements from the Web Services Architecture[1] (WSA) led by the World Wide Web Consortium[2] (W3C), specifically publish/subscribe communication and service security. Unfortunately, the various standard components are seldom completely independent, and when separate components are jointly deployed unanticipated interactions sometimes cause significant problems at implementation time. The nature of the conflicts is discussed within the context of a specific system implementation the Transportation Security Sensor Network (TSSN) and interim solutions presented.
Publication
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The emerging trend of providing business, government and academic services through the World Wide Web, and subsequent value availability, has caused an acceleration in the number and sophistication of web application threats. Since the consequences of security breaches in web applications can be severe, there is an increasing demand for proper security mechanisms. At the same time the decreased time-frame of web application development projects has led to numerous Web Application Frameworks, which are extensible skeletons allowing developers to focus on business logic instead of application setup. Since such frameworks encapsulate and often hide implementation details, developers should not use them without reserve, especially when it comes to security features. To aid developers investigate such security features we have in this project created a method for evaluating security in Web Application Frameworks. Our focus has been to create a straight-forward method which developers can perform themselves that encourages information sharing through graphical representation. To demonstrate the method we have evaluated Ruby on Rails, a popular Web Application Framework.
Web engineering
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