Problems
As is probably clear from the previous sections, Web Services are still experiencing a lot of turbulence, and it will take a while before they can really catch on. Here is a brief look at what problems surround currently existing security standards and their implementations.
Immaturity of the standards
Most of the standards are either very recent (couple years old at most), or still being developed. Although standards development is done in committees, which, presumably, reduces risks by going through an exhaustive reviewing and commenting process, some error scenarios still slip in periodically, as no theory can possibly match the testing resulting from pounding by thousands of developers working in the real field.
Additionally, it does not help that for political reasons some of these standards are withheld from public process, which is the case with many standards from the WSA arena (see 0), or that some of the efforts are duplicated, as was the case with LA and WS-Federation specifications.
Performance
XML parsing is a slow task, which is an accepted reality, and SOAP processing slows it down even more. Now, with expensive cryptographic and textual conversion operations thrown into the mix, these tasks become a performance bottleneck, even with the latest crypto- and XML-processing hardware solutions offered today. All of the products currently on the market are facing this issue, and they are trying to resolve it with varying degrees of success.
Hardware solutions, while substantially (by orders of magnitude) improving the performance, cannot always be used as an optimal solution, as they cannot be easily integrated with the already existing back-end software infrastructure, at least, not without making performance sacrifices. Another consideration whether hardware-based systems are the right solution, they are usually highly specialized in what they are doing, while modern Application Servers and security frameworks can usually offer a much greater variety of protection mechanisms, protecting not only Web Services, but also other deployed applications in a uniform and consistent way.
Complexity and interoperability
As could be deduced from the previous sections, Web Service security standards are fairly complex, and have very steep learning curve associated with them. Most of the current products, dealing with Web Service security, suffer from very mediocre usability due to the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. Configuring all different policies, identities, keys, and protocols takes a lot of time and good understanding of the involved technologies, as most of the times errors that end users are seeing have very cryptic and misleading descriptions.
In order to help administrators and reduce security risks from service misconfigurations, many companies develop policy templates, which group together best practices for protecting incoming and outgoing SOAP messages. Unfortunately, this work is not currently on the radar of any of the standard's bodies, so it appears unlikely that such templates will be released for public use any time soon. Closest to this effort may be WS-I's Basic Security Profile (BSP), which tries to define the rules for better interoperability among Web Services, using a subset of common security features from various security standards like WSS. However, this work is not aimed at supplying the administrators with ready for deployment security templates matching the most popular business use cases, but rather at establishing the least common denominator.
Key management
Key management usually lies at the foundation of any other security activity, as most protection mechanisms rely on cryptographic keys one way or another. While Web Services have XKMS protocol for key distribution, local key management still presents a huge challenge in most cases, since PKI mechanism has a lot of well-documented deployment and usability issues. Those systems that opt to use homegrown mechanisms for key management run significant risks in many cases, since questions of storing, updating, and recovering secret and private keys more often than not are not adequately addressed in such solutions.
Problems
As is probably clear from the previous sections, Web Services are still experiencing a lot of turbulence, and it will take a while before they can really catch on. Here is a brief look at what problems surround currently existing security standards and their implementations.
Immaturity of the standards
Most of the standards are either very recent (couple years old at most), or still being developed. Although standards development is done in committees, which, presumably, reduces risks by going through an exhaustive reviewing and commenting process, some error scenarios still slip in periodically, as no theory can possibly match the testing resulting from pounding by thousands of developers working in the real field.
Additionally, it does not help that for political reasons some of these standards are withheld from public process, which is the case with many standards from the WSA arena (see 0), or that some of the efforts are duplicated, as was the case with LA and WS-Federation specifications.
Performance
XML parsing is a slow task, which is an accepted reality, and SOAP processing slows it down even more. Now, with expensive cryptographic and textual conversion operations thrown into the mix, these tasks become a performance bottleneck, even with the latest crypto- and XML-processing hardware solutions offered today. All of the products currently on the market are facing this issue, and they are trying to resolve it with varying degrees of success.
Hardware solutions, while substantially (by orders of magnitude) improving the performance, cannot always be used as an optimal solution, as they cannot be easily integrated with the already existing back-end software infrastructure, at least, not without making performance sacrifices. Another consideration whether hardware-based systems are the right solution, they are usually highly specialized in what they are doing, while modern Application Servers and security frameworks can usually offer a much greater variety of protection mechanisms, protecting not only Web Services, but also other deployed applications in a uniform and consistent way.
Complexity and interoperability
As could be deduced from the previous sections, Web Service security standards are fairly complex, and have very steep learning curve associated with them. Most of the current products, dealing with Web Service security, suffer from very mediocre usability due to the complexity of the underlying infrastructure. Configuring all different policies, identities, keys, and protocols takes a lot of time and good understanding of the involved technologies, as most of the times errors that end users are seeing have very cryptic and misleading descriptions.
In order to help administrators and reduce security risks from service misconfigurations, many companies develop policy templates, which group together best practices for protecting incoming and outgoing SOAP messages. Unfortunately, this work is not currently on the radar of any of the standard's bodies, so it appears unlikely that such templates will be released for public use any time soon. Closest to this effort may be WS-I's Basic Security Profile (BSP), which tries to define the rules for better interoperability among Web Services, using a subset of common security features from various security standards like WSS. However, this work is not aimed at supplying the administrators with ready for deployment security templates matching the most popular business use cases, but rather at establishing the least common denominator.
Key management
Key management usually lies at the foundation of any other security activity, as most protection mechanisms rely on cryptographic keys one way or another. While Web Services have XKMS protocol for key distribution, local key management still presents a huge challenge in most cases, since PKI mechanism has a lot of well-documented deployment and usability issues. Those systems that opt to use homegrown mechanisms for key management run significant risks in many cases, since questions of storing, updating, and recovering secret and private keys more often than not are not adequately addressed in such solutions.
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