Validating Security Policy Conformance with WS-Security Requirements

Abstract

Web Services Security (WS-Security) is a technology to secure the data exchanges in SOA applications. The security requirements for WS-Security are specified as a security policy expressed in Web Services Security Policy (WS-SecurityPolicy). The WS-I Basic Security Profile (BSP) describes the best-practices security practices for addressing the security concerns of WS-Security. It is important to prepare BSP-conformant security policies, but it is quite hard for developers to create valid security polices because the security policy representations are complex and difficult to fully understand. In this paper, we present a validation technology for security policy conformance with WS-Security messages. We introduce an Internal Representation (IR) representing a security policy and its validation rules, and a security policy is known to be valid if it conforms to the rules after the policy is transformed into the IR. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our validation technology and evaluate its performance on a prototype implementation. Our technology makes it possible for a developer without deep knowledge of WS-Security and WS-SecurityPolicy to statically check if a policy specifies appropriate security requirements.