Evaluating WS-security and XACML in web services-based network management

The use of Web services in network management has became a reality after recent researches and industry standardization effort. Although performance is a critical issue, as well as security support, no investigation so far has observed how secure Web services communications perform when employed for network management. In this paper we present a first investigation in this subject by evaluating the performance of WS-Security and XACML in a scenario where remote processes information is retrieved. Our evaluation shows that encryption and access control increase the response time more than other aspects like message signature or authentication. We also observe that messages carrying security information are 10 times larger than unsecure messages, which may prevent the retrieval of a large number of information and short periods of time.