Guarding Sensitive Information Streams through the Jungle of Composite Web Services

Abstract

Complex and dynamic web service compositions may introduce unpredictable and unintentional sharing of security-sensitive data (e.g., credit card numbers) as well as unexpected vulnerabilities that cause information leak. This paper describes a fine-grain access policy specification of security-sensitive data items for each component web service. We propose the SF-Guard architecture to enforce these access policies at component web services. A prototype implementation of SF-Guard (on Apache Axis2) and its evaluation show that effective protection of security-sensitive information can be achieved at low overhead (a few percent addition to response time) while preserving the functionality of flexible web service composition.