Web services have been a major technology trend in the IT industry for almost a decade now. They have been promoted as a means of reducing costs, increasing reuse, simplifying integration and creating more agile infrastructures. For these reasons the industry has witnessed a pervasive shift in the use of technology, as Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) replace other methods and technologies used in design, development, deployment and integration, and management services. In this context, security represents a special concern, because without a solid foundation for security, the Web services stack would be next to useless. In this dissertation the topic of security in the context of Web services is addressed and an architecture for security systems is proposed. The main idea behind this architecture is that security functions such as authentication, authorization, audit, etc. are implemented externally to the service provider, and not embedded in this one or implemented at the message middleware layer. Furthermore, the different security functions are realized as independent services and designed according to the principle of separation of concerns. This leads to a collection of security services forming a security infrastructure: these services can be used to protect several service providers within a network. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) techniques are used for combining the security services together and binding them to service providers through the definition of choreographies. Because of its service-oriented approach to security, the architecture is named the Service Oriented Security Architecture or SOSA. In the dissertation, the existing work in this direction is first evaluated. Then, the main components, connectors and information elements of this architecture are specified by means of the ISO Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing. Two prototype implementations are showed, and practical experiences using these implementations to protect Web services serving geographical content are described. The architecture is analyzed both from a design point of view as well as from the point of view of the impact that it has on the performance of service providers. This work closes with a conclusion and outlook.
«Web services have been a major technology trend in the IT industry for almost a decade now. They have been promoted as a means of reducing costs, increasing reuse, simplifying integration and creating more agile infrastructures. For these reasons the industry has witnessed a pervasive shift in the use of technology, as Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) replace other methods and technologies used in design, development, deployment and integration, and management services. In th...
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