Securing Web Services using Service Token Security

Authors

  • Stelian Dumitra Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies
  • Bogdan Vasilciuc Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies

Keywords:

web services, windows identity foundation, service token security, windows communication foundation, security assertion markup language, federation, SOAP, WS-Security, collaborative system

Abstract

Web services are distributed components that enable interaction of software componentsacross organizational boundaries. The main advantages of web services are related to the flexibility and versatility: they support a variety of architectures and are independent of platforms and models. Also, they can expose valuable data, applications and systems of organizations to a variety of external threats. Securing web services is one of the most important topics related to them. This paper describes the core web services specifications, the top threats facing web services and the security fundamentals. At the end of the paper is presented a custom authentication and authorization model (brokered authentication) to ensure a robust protection, a model that shows how to authenticate and authorize callers to perform operations and how to access resources. This model uses the following frameworks/standards: Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) to apply the principles of claims-based identity, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), to develop services/client services and integrate with WIF, and Service Token Security (STS), to issue security tokens.

The conclusions and the future proposed developments are presented in the end of the paper.

References

Web of Services, [Online] Available: http://www.w3.org/standards/webofservices

Tzima, F. and Mitkas, P., Web Services Techology, Information Science Reference, pp. 25-44, 2008

Dumitrache, M., Dumitra, S., Baciu, M., Web Services Integration with Distributed Applications, Journal of Applied Quantitative Methods, vol. 5, no. 2, 2010, pp 223-233

Bertino, E., Martino, L., Paci, F., Squicciarini, A. Security for Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, 2010, pp 1-77

Maier, J.D., Farre, C., Taylor, J., Improving Web Services Security - Scenarios and Implementation Guidance for WCF, Microsoft, 2009, [Online] Available: http://wcfsecurity.codeplex.com/

Singhal, A., Winograd, T., Scarfone, K., Guide to Secure Web Services – Recommendations of the National Institute of Standards and Techonology, NIST Special Publications, August 2007, [Online] Available http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-95/SP800-95.pdf

Cheng, S., Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 Cookbook for Developing SOA Application, Packt Publishing, 2010

Bertoccio, V., Programming Windows Identity Foundation, Microsoft Press, Redmond Washington, 2011

Brown, K., Mani, S., Microsoft Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) Whitepaper for Developers, Microsoft Corporation, 2009

SAML, [Online] Available: http://saml.xml.org/

Michèle Leroux Bustamante, Project, Claims-Based Authorization with WIF, [Online] Available: Http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee335707.aspx

Windows Identity Foundation, [Online] Available: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh377151.aspx]

Downloads

Published

2014-06-30

How to Cite

Dumitra, S., & Vasilciuc, B. (2014). Securing Web Services using Service Token Security. Journal of Mobile, Embedded and Distributed Systems, 6(2), 77-89. Retrieved from http://jmeds.eu/index.php/jmeds/article/view/Securing_Web_Services_using_Service_Token_Security