Paper Info
Title
A Secure Information Flow Architecture for Web Services
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 information flow 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. 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/SCC.2008.121
IEEE SCC (1)
Keywords
Field
DocType
normal wsp functionality,web services,current wsps,entire wsp,apache axis2 wsp,current web service platform,security-sensitive information handling,software complexity,secure information flow architecture,security-sensitive data access,new information flow architecture,security-sensitive data,web service,service oriented architecture,information security,software testing,data handling,software architecture,data access,computer architecture,data security,information flow,software metrics
Information flow (information theory),Computer science,Credit card,Software,Software architecture,Software metric,Web service,Programming complexity,Data access,Operating system
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2474-8137
3
0.42
References 
Authors
19
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lenin Singaravelu115310.44
Jinpeng Wei222120.22
Calton Pu35377877.83