Proposal and development of the Web services input validation model

Abstract

The SOA architecture primarily based on Web services is experiencing a steady adoption, although its growth was lower than expected when it was launched, mainly because of security related concerns. Web services inherited many well-known security problems of Web applications and brought new ones. Major data breaches today are consequences of bad input validation at the application level. This paper presents a way to implement an input validation model for Web services which can be used to prevent cross-site scripting and SQL injection through the use of predefined models which specify valid inputs. The proposed WSIVM (Web Services Input Validation Model) consists of an XML schema, an XML specification, and a module for performing input validation according to the schema. A case study showing the effectiveness and performance of this mechanism is also presented.