Flooding Attack Issues of Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures

The service-oriented architecture paradigm slowly matures towards some kind of “Web Service Internet” where basically everybody may use the services others provide. Though this evolution enables lots of opportunities for electronic business, it also induces many new security issues to consider. One important security threat to SOA consists in request floodings, which—being intentional or accidental—may rapidly lead to Denial-of-Service and other kinds of malfunctions. In this paper, we will reconsider some of the known flooding attacks on Web Services, advance to flooding issues of basic service compositions, and finally derive some conclusions for security considerations of service-oriented architectures in general.