CRESCENT+ A Secure Reliable Framework for Durable Composite Web Services Management

Abstract

Currently, a lot of service providers, provide the users with e cient atomic web services as per their requirement. But, owing to the increasing value of automation and complexity of requirements of users, there is a need to develop complex webs services and provide one stop shops for users. Integra- tion/composition of two or more web services helps to reduce complexity for clients, thus increasing usability and providing better opportunities to attain complex functionalities in a simpler way. Creation and management of com- posite web services being a complex task in itself has not been su ciently researched and discussed in literature so far. But, recently, it has become an active research topic in the eld of web services. Many solutions have been proposed in this regard; however, they do not address the security of web services composition management. Furthermore, a lot of uncertainty aspects exist that could most likely cause hindrance in e ciency of composite web services delivery like possibility of any involved module to fail. Also, unex- pected user demand raises can most likely become a reason of depletion of resources as well as can cause the service capacity and ultimately its perfor- mance to degrade. In addition to that there is a need to ensure security for all involved tasks and user/module interactions. Owing to these and many other security related challenges, this research focuses on these issues and provides a comprehensive secure framework for web service composition management. In order to carry out our research, we analyzed CRESCENT, which is a reli- able framework for management of composite web services. The framework ensures reliable automated management for all composite web services life cycle tasks. We identi ed the security vulnerabilities in CRESCENT with intent to provide a valuable and feasible solution for the overwhelming se- curity challenges of this framework. CRESCENT has been proven to be an e ective and reliable composite web service management framework. Our solution includes addition of security mechanisms into the framework that will allow the users to avail desired web services in a more sophisticated way without violation of any of their security requirements. We implemented a secure session mechanism as proof of concept for the whole framework.