Securing Web Services using Service Token Security
Stelian Dumitra, Bogdan Vasilciuc · Journal of Mobile, Embedded and Distributed Systems (JMEDS) - Journal of Mobile, Embedded and Distributed Systems · 2014
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.