Severe SOA Security Threats on SOAP Web Services– A Critical Analysis
Mohamed Ibrahim B, Mohamed Shanavas A R · IOSR Journal of Computer Engineering · 2014
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) involves several technologies; among them, the popularand recent one is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).Mainly, SOA is used for developing loosely coupled distributed applications.Loosely coupled applications are a group of applications (to form EAI) which can operate independently of each other.The early SOA was achieved by using a number of architectures which include DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model), ORB (Object Request Broker), and RMI (Remote Method Invocation).However, these architectures work on their own defined protocols, and these protocols are specific to certain languages and compilers that do not permit the construction of distributed systems over heterogeneous platforms.Currently SOA provides remedies to these issues using common internet protocols in the form of Web Services.A service is a Software component that is well-defined, self-contained, and does not depend on the context or state of other services.The Web Service provides well-defined interfaces for distributed functionalities, which are independent of machine architectures, operating systems, and programming languages.In this way, Web Services has emerged as a dominant paradigm for constructing and composing distributed business collaborations over the web.As Web Services architecture is dynamic and loosely coupled, security aspects must be considered thoroughly at the time of designing, because Web Services require high security.In this paper, the authors critically analyzed few severe SOA security threats and their implications on SOAP Web Services based on the literature study and their real-time experience.