Authors:
Christian Mainka
1
;
Meiko Jensen
1
;
Luigi Lo Iacono
2
and
Jörg Schwenk
1
Affiliations:
1
Horst Görtz Institute for IT-Security, Germany
;
2
Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Germany
Keyword(s):
XML Signature, XML Signature Wrapping, Web Services, WS-security, SOA, Cloud.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Cloud Computing
;
Cloud Standards
;
Collaboration and e-Services
;
Communication and Software Technologies and Architectures
;
Data Engineering
;
e-Business
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Fundamentals
;
Languages, Tools and Architectures
;
Mobile Software and Services
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Service-Oriented Architectures
;
Services Science
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Software Engineering
;
Software Engineering Methods and Techniques
;
Technology Platforms
;
Telecommunications
;
Web Services
;
Wireless Information Networks and Systems
Abstract:
XML Encryption and XML Signature are fundamental security standards forming the core for many applications which require to process XML-based data. Due to the increased usage of XML in distributed systems and platforms such as in SOA and Cloud settings, the demand for robust and effective security mechanisms increased as well. Recent research work discovered, however, substantial vulnerabilities in these standards as well as in the vast majority of the available implementations. Amongst them, the so-called XML Signature Wrapping attack belongs to the most relevant ones. With the many possible instances of this attack type, it is feasible to annul security systems relying on XML Signature and to gain access to protected resources as has been successfully demonstrated lately for various Cloud infrastructures and services.
This paper contributes a comprehensive approach to robust and effective XML Signatures for SOAP-based Web Services. An architecture is proposed, which integrates the
required enhancements to ensure a fail-safe and robust signature generation and verification. Following this architecture, a hardened XML Signature library has been implemented. The obtained evaluation results show that the developed concept and library provide the targeted robustness against all kinds of known XML Signature Wrapping attacks. Furthermore the empirical results underline, that these security merits are obtained at low efficiency and performance costs as well as remain compliant with the underlying standards.
(More)