Participant Domain Name Token Profile for security enhancements supporting service oriented architecture

This research proposes a new secure token profile for improving the existing Web Services security standards. It provides a new authentication mechanism. This additional level of security is important for the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is an architectural style that uses a set of principles and design rules to shape interacting applications and maintain interoperability. Currently, the market push is towards SOA, which provides several advantages, for instance: integration with heterogeneous systems, services reuse, standardization of data exchange, etc. Web Services is one of the technologies to implement SOA and it can be implemented using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). A SOAP-based Web Service relies on XML for its message format and common application layer protocols for message negotiation and transmission. However, it is a security challenge when a message is transmitted over the network, especially on the Internet. The Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced a set of Web Services Security standards that focus on two major areas. “Who” can use the Web Service and “What” are the permissions. However, the location or domain of the message sender is not authenticated. Therefore, a new secure token profile called: Participant Domain Name Token Profile (PDNT) is created to tackle this issue. The PDNT provides a new security feature, which the existing token profiles do not address. Location-based authentication is achieved if adopting the PDNT when using Web Services. In the performance evaluation, PDNT is demonstrated to be significantly faster than other secure token profiles. The processing overhead of using the PDNT with other secure token profiles is very small given the additional security provided. Therefore all the participants can acquire the benefits of increased security and performance at low cost.