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Architecture for Integrated and Intelligent Security for Mobile Web Services Web services have become a promising technology in the IT industry that emphasizes the realization of ServiceOriented Architecture (SOA) and the simplification of interoperability. The web services technology change the software industry dramatically by developing and integrating enterprise web services and applications for easy access Web services have been promoted for reducing costs, increasing reuse, simplifying integration and creating more agile infrastructures. The recent trends in the web services promise a cosmic revolution in the near future where applications can be created by combining multiple services in a single workflow. The services can be added, removed or replaced from a workflow either statically in the development phase or dynamically at run-time. Web service can be used for enterprise applications but the services can be extended to the rural population for their day today applications in real life services-marketing, e-shopping, e-portals for their basic needs etc.. Presently, sharing and processing of enterprises information become more cumbersome. The users have to switch between applications, re-enter data multiple times, and spend more time searching for key data. This leads to less productivity, higher costs, mistakes, and reduced overall customer satisfaction. To overcome these issues, the application developers have to provide convention patches and tools. But this could be very costly since the legacy applications were written by different companies. With Web Services, each application must adhere to a set of standardized protocols for sharing and accessing the enterprises data. Therefore, web services technology has emerged as a standard mechanism for Enterprise Application Integration by enabling the sharing of resources such as databases, programs, enterprise services etc among loosely-coupled, heterogeneous systems Due to advances on mobile technology and the proliferation of mobile devices’ use, the Mobile Web Services have fallen into upcoming research area that involves mobile devices, applications, middleware, and mobile networks. Compared with web applications, mobile services and applications can really make anyone gain the entire information and services at any time, any place and on any device. There has been in these days a notable increase in consumer use of mobile applications. The rapid growth of mobile networks and services fueled by next generation mobile communications systems research has ushered in the area of ubiquitous computing. Light weight portable computers, IP based office and home appliances, and the popularity of Internet is strong forces to the service providers to support seamless user mobility. Realizing commercially viable secure IP mobility support over the current cellular infrastructure remains a research challenge. According to Comscore study, the Mobile advertising is exploding and is going to hit $3 billion by 2012 [1]. The amount spending for mobile advertising is gradually increased recently that indicates where an industry is headed. In the next two years Juniper Research predicts that approximately three billion mobile coupons will be issued to phones. Bar coded mobile coupons, another new trend, are now becoming a significant practice amongst bigger businesses [2]. Big retailers such as WalMart, Best Buy, Sears, and J.C. Penney have built mobile web sites specifically and iPhone applications in the last year [3]. These applications have allowed consumers to order products, read reviews and provide other services to their clients. Further mobile android applications and services now have over 70,000 in the market but there is still lag behind the iPhone applications [4]. Therefore mobile web services have become the significant technology for the IT industry. However while hosting web services on mobile devices, there are number of challenges limiting the successful deployment of mobile web services like restricted use of resources, disconnection during service execution, low bandwidth and security. The major problem in successful mobile web services is lack of adequate security. The encryption techniques such as secret-key and public key infrastructure are the most common methods to ensure transaction privacy, confidentiality and integrity. However, these techniques are depending upon the security of the endpoint systems in terms of protecting the keys from modification or misuse [5]. While providing several benefits, the web service security technology is facing serious threats like prefix hijacking and interception [6]. A fraudulent intruder can hijack a prefix in order to attack against performance and launch denial-of-service attack [7]. After hijacking the prefix, the malicious intruder can attack against security and launch Man-in-the-Middle attack (MITM) [8], which can occur between any two communicating parties. Yang et al [9] have provided details about the MITM attack on user authentication from the remote autonomous object. According to Xu et al[10], there are three factors pertaining to information security such as confidentiality, integrity and availability. There is also an exceptional demand for preserving the confidentiality and integrity of service messages that traverse on mobile networks. The existing mobile web service security mechanisms that thwart unauthorized access to the database and illicit service flow among the resources turn out to be inadequate to ensure security over the cellular networks. This situation is mainly due to the emergence of distributed services architectures, the high degree of exposure of communication channels and the increasing necessity for sharing the variety of resources available in the network. Therefore the aim of this paper is to propose the architecture for integrated and intelligent security for web services via mobile devices anywhere and at any time. Sheng et al. (2002) have proposed the architecture for mobile web service that integrated mobile agents with mobile services to achieve convenient and efficient use of web services. In the proposed architecture, the mobile agents are implemented for searching the web services from UDDI and locating the mobile users. The architecture is also considered web services serving in push and pull mechanism. Although the suggested architecture primarily considers service agents mechanism, it does not provide any security for service agents’ interaction. Masashi et al.(2003) have proposed a scalable security description framework with open APIs based on WS-Security. The framework has provided AAA security system where time-constraints, purchase price and network connection issues are considered. In order to support scalability for mobile web services, the architecture has adopted XML-based interface description, token description, procedure description and service context description. Although the framework has mainly focused the user authentication, authorization and accounting, it does not address remaining security mechanisms confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation. such as Haiping et al.(2008) have designed an XML firewall security model for web services systems. The aim of this model is to enhance the conventional firewalls that accomplishes packet filtering at the transport and session layer, rather than verifying user permissions and examining the contents of each packet at application layer. Since the formal firewall does not examine the content of a packet, it is not able to identify threats such as SQL injection, denial of service (DoS), schema poisoning and so on. Nevertheless, this formal model supports the user authentication as well as role-based user authorization according to policy rules that can be updated dynamically. The user interacts with the application through the user interface. The application logic then processes the requests from the user and initiates service calls that may in turn invoke either a single web service or a cluster of web services. The request from the application is verified by the XML firewall for authenticity and authorize based on the state information available in the state DB database. When the request is affirmed to be valid, it then passes the request to the corresponding web service; otherwise, the request is rejected. The administrator of an XML firewall has the privilege of changing the policies available in the policy database through the administration module. Although this model supports authentication and authorization, it has limitations in providing support for the security issue like non-repudiation. Maher et al.(2010) have proposed an architectural model to offer secure and flexible web service using PKI and agent technology. This model contains two components. The first component concerns with PKI utilization by the clients and providers along with their certificates. The second component involves the UDDI which performs as a trust centre between clients and the servers to enhance the web services security. A prior registration and the publication of the public key are mandatory for each involved party. Each involved party must publish their own public key over the UDDI, during the subscription process, to have secure communication. Once subscribed, any given party can authenticate and access web services using the public key of the other party to communicate together in a secure manner. In order to reduce the communication, each client and provider shall record all useful data of his authenticated providers and clients on a special list, by which one of them requests a web service another time. Once the client and the provider get acquainted with each other, both the parties will communicate further without the involvement of the trust centre for negotiation till the agreement. The primary objective of this architecture is to enhance the security using mobile agents. However, the secure communication between agents is another concern and there is no technical information about them which leads to shortcoming of this model. Ahmed et al. (2010) have presented a service oriented integration and security adaptation framework. This framework can be used to adapt the security policies of organizational workflow and its web services. The adaptation of the organizational workflows and the web services securities is verified through security and adaptation engines rules. The framework consists of four main modules such as input, abstract level, concrete level, and security and adaptation engines. The input module consists of the various inputs like WSDL file, BPEL file and BPEL security rules for each stage of the framework. Abstract level module consists of three basic blocks such as Web service checking, Verification and Validation (V&V), BPEL adaptation and Web service removal. WS-Checking ensures the inputs against web service standards and web service security rules. V&V verifies the BPEL security rules against BPEL security tags and validates the possibility of security adaptation and integration into the workflow of web services. BPELAdaptation gets used to the provided web service(s) in terms of BPEL security by invoking or replacing the existing web services. Finally, WS-Removal checks the requirements with existing web service(s) and removes a specific web service from the work flow, if necessary. Concrete level module contains WS-Checking and BPEL adaptation blocks. Security and adaptation engines support each abstract level function such as set of rules and standards. However, it requires further work on security tag specification of the business process workflow, formalization of security adaptation and integration processes and the orchestration of inter-organizational services. Rabeb et al (2011) have evaluated the performance of mobile web service for their newly developed architecture. The architecture has provided a mechanism for resuming and managing the network connections when they are disconnected. The authors are also identified and evaluated some of the QoS of web services such as response time, availability, throughput and scalability. The developed architecture is applied to both SOAP and RESTful web services and obtained the results that latter web services are more convenient for mobile web services and do not degrade the performance levels with respect to QoS. The architecture considers general issues for mobile web services, however, it failures to consider the major challenges and limitations in mobile networks and security. The architecture defines the structure of components, their interrelationships, the principles and guidelines governing their design and evolution over time. The protocols like HTTPS are used as the standard communication protocol between the clients, agents and the information service providers. The proposed architectural model provides the necessary technical infrastructure such as acquiring client information, connectivity, and security services like authentication, authorization, confidentiality, integrity, nonrepudiation, accounting and auditing. The proposed architecture comprises of the following entities such as Service Requesters (SR), Request/Response handler, WS Security Manager (WS-SM), AAA server, Web Service Manager (WSM), DBS Security Manager (DBS-SM), Service Agent Manager (SAM), SA Security Manager (SA-SM), Information Server, Content Filter Server (CFS) and simulated ISPs. SR 1 SR 2 SR 3 SR n ........... L2 WS Security Manager L1 AAA Server Request / Response Handler Web service Manager Information Service Providers Service Agent Manager L4 SA Security Manager L5 Integrated Security Architecture Content Filter Server DBS Security Manager Information Server Public Network L3 DB Figure 1: Proposed Integrated and Intelligent Security Architecture for Mobile Web Services The proposed architecture incorporate web services technologies, namely UDDI, SOAP, and WSDL in mobile agent platform. The architecture integrates the security mechanisms at various levels such as user authentication, service messages, database access, mobile agent’s interactions between information service providers with UDDI via SOAP and content filtering. Therefore the client could obtain the result of services via the user interface supported by the architecture. Consequently, the proposed architecture supports the independence of mobile agent and the convenience of mobile web services. The mobile agents are deployed at the Service Agent Manager and the Server is established by using UDDI4J of WSTK (web services toolkit) produced by IBM and UDDI SDK produced by Microsoft. Simple object Access protocol (SOAP) is recognized as a standardized architecture for Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). However, SOA can also be implemented using other technologies such as REST. SOAP is a messaging protocol using XML that consists of envelope, encoding rules, remote procedures calls and binding agreements. The envelop defines the architecture for describing the body of the message and the header representing how to process it. The functionalities of the proposed architecture are as follows: Service Requester (SR) SR is an either mobile or web user who can search and obtain the services from the service registries of ISA. They are categorized into Registers Service Requester (RSR) and Guest Service Requester (GSR). The RSRs are the active service requesters who may be staff and administrators of the ISA’s corporate or outsiders. Unlike GSRs, the Registered Service Requesters need to be registered with the ISA by providing their details. During the service requisition, the RSRs are authenticated and authorized by the AAA server of the ISA. Request/Response Handler (RRH) The RRH handles the various request and responses raised by the service requester. The ISA provides service interfaces for the requesters to obtain the service requests. The requester interfaces for web services can be formulated using any format like XML. However, those interfaces are converted to SOAP message to invoke the web services from the different service providers. After the service is executed, the results will be returned to the service requester as a SOAP message. The requester interfaces are secured using Public Key Infrastructure mechanism. WS Security Manager (WSSM) The WS-SM offers a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution for policy management and security service infrastructure. It acts as packet filtering server that only restricts IP addresses or TCP ports recorded in an IP table and fails to detect a packet with XML data tampered with an SQL injection attack. Presently, most of the web services are SOAP-based or simply XML-based, which are bound to HTTP protocol and they are typically not blocked by the conventional firewalls. The major threats to the web services are XML-based attacks, which rely on XML messages and on application layer protocols such as HTTP for message negotiation and transmission. The typical XML-based attacks include XPath injection attack, XML-based denial of service (XDoS) attack, overloaded payload attack, recursive payload attack, parameter tampering attack, XML injection attack, SQL injection attack, and schema poisoning attack. WSSM supports additional security services like confidentiality, message integrity and non-repudiation using PKI. In WSSM, the access to web services is granted only to those who are authenticated and authorized to have access to the services. The WSSM also provides Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), which is widely accepted model proposed by NIST. AAA Server The AAA is responsible for authenticating the Service Requester by validating their credentials of the RSRs with the help of WSSM. It provides lightweight security procedures to authenticate the each service requester. The AAA server also maintains the records for login access. After SR is successfully authenticated, the AAA’s authorization process is used to restrict what action a SR can perform or what service the SR can access. The AAA’s accounting process keeps the information about authentication and authorization events for each service requesters. Web Service Manager (WSM) The WSM is responsible for obtaining the service requester’s requests and providing web services responses through RRH, creating a log for each service request, configuring the web services, maintaining Web Service Registry (WSR), establishing communication with the remaining entities of the ISA and with information service providers via Service Agent Manager (SAM), and providing security services. Since there are a growing number of frequently accessed web services that utilize mirror servers to enhance the reliability and performance of the web services. Mirror servers simply replicate the entire or significant content of CWSS. When the user requests for web service, the service request is redirected to any one of the mirrors that are co-located to the service requester. Since each mirror has a portion of the total services, service requester can be served faster and their download times can be reduced. Once the service request is received by the WSM, it configures the web services using service registry. If the requester made a request for new service, which are not available in service registry, the WSM sends request for new service to the ISP through Service Agent Manager (SAM). When request arrives to the WSM, the WSM could find the services via UDDI and communicates with the DBS-SM through WS-SM. DBS Security Manager (DBS-SM) DBS Security manager provides security policies for accessing both web and data services Data services are also essential web services that provide unique access to data stored in heterogeneous systems. The DBSSM provides a secure interface to facilitate the easy access of service information stored in the database. The reliable and secure access of web and data service information can be accomplished using WS-Security and WS-Reliable Messaging with the help of DBSSM. Service Agent Manager (SAM) The SAM adopts agent platform to fetch the new or updated service requests from different information service providers. In the proposed system, the SAM is an agent server between WSM and Information Service Providers (ISPs). For each service request to respective ISP, the SAAM creates agent and by which it collects new service or updated service information. The secure communication between SAM and ISPs is taken care by Service Agent Security Manager (SASM). According to the Web Service Manager’s request, the SAM is also responsible to update the web and data services periodically as per policy enforced by the WSM with ISPs. Service Agent Security Manager (SASM) The SASM establishes and authenticates the communication with ISPs from public network to obtain the web services. The Information Service Provider may provide the service information and data services defined by WSDL to the SASM. The information about both web and data services are then stored at Information Server (IS) of ISA. XML encryption and XML signature are adopted to provide secure communication. XML signature supports the use of message digest, keyed hash message and digital signature which are used to authenticate and ensure the integrity of the XML messages. XML encryption is used to encrypt the service responses. Information Server (IS) The new and updated services are stored at Information Server of ISA where it keeps unformatted and unfiltered services information. The Information Server (IS) then forwards the services information to Content Filter Server (CFS) for filtering process. Content Filter Server (CFS) The CFS plays a major role in the proposed architecture. The CFS applies different mechanisms to clean unwanted and unrelated service information sent by the IS. Filtering the web contents is a most difficult task which is supported by intelligent mobile agent architecture. In this architecture, the intelligent agent interface for service request is designed in a natural language then passed to the Domain Processor (DP). The DP analyzes the request interface to capture its purposes, problems and constraints. The DP engine selects a suitable method for filtering from available semantic web rules and produces final results. Once the service information is filtered, which is sent to the database through DBS Security Manager (DBS-SM). In the proposed architecture, the requester sends the service request to the service provider who has implemented the ISA. Initially, the Request/Response Handler receives the services requests from the clients and forwards them to the WS Security Manager (WSSM) for validation. The WSSM verifies the service request and forwards to the AAA server for authentication and authorization. Once the user is authenticated and granted for accessing the services, AAA server sends the request to the Web Service Manager (WSM). The WSM checks the services request with service registry such as UDDI and configures the web service requests. While processing the service request, WSM adds request authentication code with service requests and sends it to the DBS-Security Manager. The DBSSM validates the authentication code and privileges, and it returns the responses to the WSM. Finally, the service responses are then forwarded to the service requester in a secured way through WSSM. In case of service requests are available at the service registry; the WSM sends a request for new service to the Service Agent Manager. The SAM creates agent for each service request and sends to the Service Agent Security Manager (SASM). The SAM also updates the services and services information periodically as per the policy imposed by the WSM. The SASM adds security mechanisms to the each service agents and establishes communication with respective information service providers to send the new service request via secured way. The proposed architecture adopts WS-Security together with Internet security infrastructure such as HTTPS. When the ISPs respond, the new services and service information are stored at Information Server via SASM and which are forwarded to the Content Filter Server for information extraction. The filtered information is then stored in the database through DB Security Manager. Meanwhile, when the new or updated services are received by the SASM, it sends a report about them to the Web Service Manager and the WSM sends the request to DB Security Manager through proper way. Finally, the WSM obtains the service responses from DBSM and forwards the same to the service requester through secured infrastructure. The main objectives of the experimental studies are to investigate the performance of the proposed architecture in terms of response time and system throughput. The ultimate aim is to have a measure of the throughput of the system with large number of service requesters. These measures are helpful during the deployment of the system as commercial product. The performance tests are automated. A proper and adjustable load of service transactions are monitored. In the proposed system, the server load would be distributed across various servers namely mobile device for service requester, AAA Server, Request/Response Server, Web Service Server, WS Security Server, DBS Security Server, DB Server, Agent Server, Agent Security Server, Information Server, Content Filter Server and simulated ISPs. The client’s service request interface is tested on Samsung Galaxy y s5360. The service requester invokes the different mobile web services over the 3G network. The performance of the client device and the network latency were observed while processing the service requests. The experimental setup consists of the following: Samsung Galaxy y s5360, Android OS version 2.3.3, CPU 830 MHz, 290 MB RAM, Apache Tomcat 5.2.0 Web Server on which Web Services are deployed, Netbeans 7.1 for SOAP web service implementation and testing used to evaluate the system response time and throughput for the proposed architecture Test Environment: Tests are conducted with 100 successive service requesters generating the service requests to the proposed system simultaneously. The maximum number of concurrent requests of 110 was chosen to represent a test-case scenario. The response time of the system is measured and reported separately for each request. Test results are analyzed to determine the goodness of the system response time. During the performance tests, the operating system performance monitor was observed. The general observation was that the load on server system was low with less number of service requesters and high with more number of requesters. However, with one concurrent requester, the load is stayed steady at about 0.01 % and with 90 service requesters a constant load was generated significantly. Response Time: The following figure illustrates the variation of system response time while increasing the number of SOAP service requests for various mobile services such as weather, health, education, shopping and agriculture services. The Figure 2 represents the performance results in terms of mean response times. On the significant scale of 1 to 100 service requests, the proposed system seems to exhibit a linearly growing mean response time. The slope of the curve is starting to steepen between 100 and 110 simultaneous service requests. This is quite natural that every system reaches the level of load where the performance observed by a single request starts to degrade dramatically. Figure 2 : The Performance Results For Mean Response time From the above figure, it is observed that the SOAP shopping web services consumes more response time than the weather services. Moreover, the shopping web services stops accepting requests at around 100 simultaneous service requests, however the high-end servers may handle more than these generated SOAP requests. The design criteria of an average response time of 4 to 9 seconds can easily be achieved. This is the response time that a service requester can expect to experience at the best. However, the network latency will further increase the response time but this has to be an acceptable one. The minimum individual response time could be achieved within the specified hardware and networking architecture and it was about 4.20 seconds. Figure 3: The performance test results - Throughput System Throughput: The Figure 3 depicts the throughput of the proposed system. The system throughput exhibits a very scalable behavior i.e. the throughput increases gradually up to 10 web service requests and keeps rapidly increasing till 100. At 100 simultaneous requests, the system has reached the saturation point due to various factors and the throughput declines. However, the proposed system provides responses to the service requests with reasonable response time and the system load is linear. From the results, it is studied that the maximum throughput of the system achieved in the tests is 16.07 service requests per second at the mean response time of 7.72 seconds. It is found that the throughput was naturally achieved when there are constantly 100 simultaneous service requests made. This level of throughput can be considered as adequate in terms of the criteria specified for the system. Thus the proposed model supports security at high level and supports response time as well as throughput significantly Web services technology is the new dimension of Web Engineering that facilitates the building of more complex web applications by composing elementary web services. Since security plays a crucial role in the web services scenario, the design and development of security architecture for complex web application has become more challenging and promising research area. Furthermore, there is a considerable amount of research work carried out to protect the mobile web services. However there is no concrete proposal available so far to build a integrated and intelligent security for cross domain web services. This paper proposes a novel architecture for securing the mobile web services at the various levels and provides intelligent security mechanisms using mobile agents. 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