Robert Steele

An Architecture for Unifying Web Services Authentication and Authorization

Robert Steele, Will Tao
University of Technology, Sydney

Abstract

Security issues are one of the major deterrents to Web Services adop-tion in mission critical applications and to the realization of the dynamic e-Business vision of Service Oriented Computing. Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is a common approach for authorization as it greatly simplifies com-plex authorization procedures in enterprise information systems. However, as most RBAC implementations rely on the manual setup of pre-defined user-ID and password combinations to identify the particular user, this makes it very hard to conduct dynamic e-Business as the service requestor and service pro-vider must have prior knowledge of each other before the transaction. This pa-per proposes a new Web Services security architecture which unifies the au-thorization and authentication processes by extending current digital certificate technologies. It enables secure Web Service authorization decisions between parties even if previously unknown to each other and it also enhances the trust-worthiness of service discovery.