WS-I* compliant web service SOAP message security performance

Abstract

The OASIS web services security (WSS) standard has been developed to provide encryption and digital signing for SOAP messaging to ensure the information in the message is confidential and that the sender and receiver are who they say they are. It has also introduced interoperability and performance problems. Interoperability has been improved with the introduction of the WS-I* Basic and Basic Security Profiles. New web stacks such as Apache CXF have attempted to address performance issues. The purpose of this research is to investigate the performance impacts of securing WS-I* compliant SOAP messages when using the Apache CXF web service framework. We measured the performance impact of WS-Security and WS-SecureConversation under different conditions and using various WS-I* compliant cryptographic algorithms. We found that WS-SecureConversation is the better option when sending a large number of messages but for a small number of large messages WS-Security can sometimes be the better option.