An Empirical Study of Security Threats and Countermeasures in Web Services-Based Services Oriented Architectures

Abstract

As enterprises deploy Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services Security and Management has become the cornerstone of successful architectures. The greatest potential of Web Services is through re-usability and flexibility. This required flexibility in turn leads to significant security and management challenges. Enterprises migrating to SOA face security challenges such as malicious and malformed SOAP messages parser vulnerabilities and Denial of Service attacks over Web Services. Discovering Web Service Vulnerabilities and Compliance Violations and establishing countermeasure policies for Web Services security threats across large enterprises need to be addressed through standards-based products. This paper explores typical Web Services implementations, threat identification methods, and countermeasures against Web Services vulnerabilities.