Security Issues of Service-Oriented Middleware

Security is a major challenge for all distributed applications; however, it imposes additional concerns and requirements when Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is used. Therefore, addressing the security issues is critical for the success of any SOC based project. Thus when utilizing service-oriented middleware (SOM), security could be included as part of the SOM architecture. SOM is a concept that has been widely adopted in the past few years, and has been regarded as a very feasible approach to tackle the security issues in the SOC paradigm. In this paper, we cover different SOC-based projects that have adopted SOM as an integral part of the security enforcement in their projects. We then move on to identify common security requirements especially inherent to SOC and which have been implemented in the set of projects we have covered. Finally, a general security model for SOM is proposed consisting of a set of decoupled services that compose the required SOM security functions.