Title:
A Secure Middleware Architecture for Web Services
A Secure Middleware Architecture for Web Services
Author(s)
Singaravelu, Lenin
Wei, Jinpeng
Pu, Calton
Wei, Jinpeng
Pu, Calton
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Abstract
Current web service platforms (WSPs) often perform all web services related
processing, including security-sensitive information handling, in the same
protection domain. Consequently, the entire WSP may have access to security-sensitive
information such as credit card numbers, forcing us to trust a large and
complex piece of software. To address this problem, we propose ISO-WSP, a new
middleware architecture that decomposes current WSPs into two parts executing in
separate protection domains: (1) a small trusted T-WSP to handle security-sensitive
data, and (2) a large, legacy untrusted U-WSP that provides the normal WSP functionality,
but uses the T-WSP for security-sensitive data handling. By restricting security-sensitive data access to T-WSP, ISO-WSP reduces the software complexity of
trusted code, thereby improving the testability of ISO-WSP. To achieve end-to-end
security, the application code is also decomposed into two parts, isolating a small
trusted part from the remaining untrusted code. The trusted part encapsulates all accesses
to security-sensitive data through a Secure Functional Interface (SFI). To
ease the migration of legacy applications to ISO-WSP, we developed tools to translate
direct manipulations of security-sensitive data by the untrusted part into SFI invocations.
Using a prototype implementation based on the Apache Axis2 WSP, we
show that ISO-WSP reduces software complexity of trusted components by a factor
of five, while incurring a modest performance overhead of few milliseconds per request.
We also show that existing applications can be migrated to run on ISO-WSP
with minimal effort: a few tens of lines of new and modified code.
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Date Issued
2007
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Text
Resource Subtype
Technical Report