Securing SOAP Web Services for Mobile Devices on Different Platforms

Enterprise applications are often arranged in service-oriented architectures (SOA) nowadays. Many times services in a SOA are implemented by SOAP web services often including application-level security. With their increased computing power mobile devices such as PDA and smart-phone become promising clients for such enterprise applications. This paper contains an analysis of built-in support for secure SOAP web services on different recent mobile device platforms. As it turns out, the support for SOAP in general is not comparable to stationary devices. This is even more true for security extensions to such web services. Therefore we also evaluate and implement feasible add-ons to the platforms providing some support. The platforms are finally compared according to several different dimensions regarding secure SOAP web services and individual strengths and weaknesses are presented.