Robustness Validation in Service-Oriented Architectures

The use of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) in enterprise applications development is increasing very quickly. In a SOA environment providers supply a set of services that must be robust. Although SOA is being used in business-critical environments, there is no practical means to measure or compare the robustness of services. Robustness failures in such environments are dangerous, as they can be maliciously exploited with severe consequences for the attacked systems. This chapter addresses the problem of robustness validation in SOA environments. The approach proposed is based on a set of robustness tests that is used to discover both programming and design errors. Two concrete examples are presented: one focusing on web services and the other targeting Java Message Service (JMS) middleware. The proposed approach is useful for both providers (to validate the robustness of deployed services) and consumers (to select the services that best fit architectural requirements).