Best-practice patterns and tool support for configuring secure web services messaging

Abstract

This paper presents an emerging tool for security configuration of service-oriented architectures with Web Services. Security is a major concern when implementing mission-critical business transactions and such concern motivated the development of Web Services Security (WS-Security). However, the existing tools for configuring the security properties of Web Services give a technology-oriented view, and only assist in choosing the data to encrypt and selecting an encryption algorithm. The users must construct their own mental models of how the security configurations actually relate to business policies. In contrast, the tool described here gives a simplified, business-policy-oriented view. It models the messaging with customers and business partners, lists various threats, and presents best-practice security patterns against the threats. A user can select among variations on the basic patterns according to the business policies, and then apply them to the messaging model through the GUI. The result of the pattern application is described in the Web Services Security Policy Language (WS-SecurityPolicy).