Web services: Security challenges

Web services have emerged as a new Web-based technology paradigm for exchanging information on the Internet using platform-neutral standards, such as XML and adopting Internet-based protocols. They offer greater accessibility of data, dynamic establishment of inter-service relationships and communication paths, inter-applications interactions and data interchange on different platforms in different locations without or with a minimal amount of direct human involvement, and a high degree of service autonomy. Most, if not all, of these features are in conflict with traditional security models and controls and hence introduce new security challenges that are different than traditional security issues. This paper presents and classifies the new security challenges introduced by Web services, and summarizes the current existing techniques on dealing with such challenges.