Evaluating the QoS Impact of Web Service Anonymity

Web services enable the collaboration across organizational boundaries and, thus, are a powerful technology for implementing global Service-oriented Architectures, i.e., the Internet of Services. Despite typical security mechanisms such as message encryption, attackers can create detailed profiles of service consumers, providers, and market places by merely monitoring communication endpoints. In a business context, this traffic analysis threatens the relationship anonymity of the participants and can reveal sensitive information about an organization´s underlying business processes or a provider´s client base. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of using established standard anonymity mechanisms on selected Quality of Service (QoS) parameters for Web services in real networks. The obtained results aim at quantifying side-effects of using state-of-the-art countermeasures for service-specific attacks in cross-organizational collaboration.