Challenges of Testing Web Services and Security in SOA Implementations
Abstract
The World Wide Web is evolving into a medium providing a wide array of e-commerce, business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and other information-based services. In Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technology, Web Services are emerging as the enabling technology that bridges decoupled systems across various platforms, programming languages, and applications. The benefits of Web Services and SOA come at the expense of introducing new level of complexity to the environments where these services are deployed. This complexity is compounded by the freedom to compose Web Services to address requirements such as quality of service (QoS), availability, security, reliability, and cost. The complexity of composing services compounds the task of securing, testing, and managing the quality of the deployed services. This chapter identifies the main security requirements for Web Services and describes how such security requirements are addressed by standards for Web Services security recently developed or under development by various standardizations bodies. Standards are reviewed according to a conceptual framework that groups them by the main functionalities they provide. Testing composite services in SOA environment is a discipline at an early stage of study. The chapter provides a brief overview of testing challenges that face early implementers of composite services in SOA taking into consideration Web Services security. The importance of Web Services Management systems in Web Services deployment is discussed. A step toward a fault model for Web Services is provided. The chapter investigates the use of crash-only software development techniques for enhancing the availability of Web Services. The chapter discusses security mechanisms from the point of view of interoperability of deployed services. The work discusses the concepts and strategies as developed by the WS-I Basic Security profile for enhancing the interoperability of secure Web Services.
Keywords
e-commerce, information based services, SOA, web services, QoS, securitym
Date of this Version
2007
Comments
Test and Analysis of Web Services 2007, Part IV, 395-440,