A study on the security impact of the web services implementation in the Malaysian government's online applications

Web services have been used in the development of loosely coupled applications, especially in government sectors. However, without proper configurations, web services may introduce security problems to the applications. The purpose of this paper is to study the relevant security factors and their degree of 'securitiness' during web services implementation in Malaysian government's online applications. The result from this study is a model of security level factors with each of the factor is colour coded based on its impact on the application's security. The classification of these factors is based on the role and code of conduct of the agencies. An impact value from the model shows the significant of the factor where a value between 2 and 3 means it can severely affect the web service implementation. The model may assist administrators or decision makers in the agencies to determine vital factors to protect their agencies from security threads.