An Approach to Discover Web Service Providers Based on Security Support

Web service invocation occurs over the Internet, which is a public network. This increases concern of the requester for adequate security of his private data. While using the web services, the security requirements of the user usually pertain to confi dentiality, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation for the input information that the user provides and the information received as output from different services. For message level security, specifi cations such as WS-Security are available that use existing algorithms. Different service providers may use different algorithms for security; however, there is presently no mechanism available to the user to discover the service providers supporting the algorithms of their choice. In this paper this important issue has been addressed and an approach to enable a service provider to publish the information related to the security support offered by it has been presented. The presented approach facilitates the service requester to discover the providers as per his security related needs. The presented method is general and easy to use as existing Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for publishing and discovery of services in the registry are used.