An End-to-End Security Auditing Approach for Service Oriented Architectures

Abstract

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a major paradigm for distributed application development in the recent explosion of Internet services and cloud computing. However, SOA introduces new security challenges not present in the single-hop client-server architectures due to the involvement of multiple service providers in a service request. The interactions of independent service domains in SOA could violate service policies or SLAs. In addition, users in SOA systems have no control on what happens in the chain of service invocations. Although the establishment of trust across all involved partners is required as a prerequisite to ensure secure interactions, still a new end-to-end security auditing mechanism is needed to verify the actual service invocations and its conformance to the expected service orchestration. In this paper, we provide an efficient solution for end-to-end security auditing in SOA. The proposed security architecture introduces two new components called taint analysis and trust broker in addition to taking advantages of WS-Security and WS-Trust standards. The interaction of these components maintains session auditing and dynamic trust among services. This solution is transparent to the services, which allows auditing of legacy services without modification. Moreover, we have implemented a prototype of the proposed approach and verified its effectiveness in a LAN setting and the Amazon EC2 cloud computing infrastructure.