A Comprehensive Model to Enhance Performance of WS-Security Processing

Service Oriented Architecture with Simple Object Access Protocol based Web Services enable flexible software system integration, especially in heterogeneous environments. These web services require proper security when they communicate critical information. These services are exposed to a variety of external threats and attacks. Therefore, security is an important issue for Web Services. Several security technologies and standards are developed to secure web services. SOAP protocol inherits problems related to XML. SOAP processing performance is one of the issues. Adding security requires extra computations. Lower performance not only affects the efficiency of system but it also affects the availability and quality of web services. A comprehensive parallel model for stream-based processing of secured web services is introduced to address these issues. It is used as application level gateway to enhance performance of security processing especially for large documents. The architectural design of the comprehensive model is described in detail in the paper. The overall performance of the new model is evaluated on different hardware platforms by conducting tests for different size of SOAP messages with varying levels of security. Significant reduction in the processing time and early detection of attacks is observed by successful implementation of the model.