Security Track

Transitioning Successfully to SOA and Web Services: Building the Infrastructure for SOA Growth

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 09:00:00 EST

This session will address how to approach service-oriented architecture (SOA) management from a project-based level while still allowing room for future expansion and incremental growth to an enterprise-wide SOA. The session will provide valuable insight into how SOA management can help organizations ease the complexity of moving toward a loosely coupled environment.

The Interoperability Challenge of Web Services Security Standards

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 17:00:00 EST

The Web Services Interoperability Organization chartered its Basic Security Profile Working Group to develop an interoperability profile involving transport layer security, SOAP message layer security, encryption, signatures, and other security considerations. This session will discuss the interoperability challenges presented by current Web services security standards and the work of the WS-I Basic Security Profile. The session will highlight typical Web services security threats and countermeasures and the related design goals, usage conventions, and conformance testing of the soon-to-be-released Basic Security Profile.

XML Content Attacks

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 16:00:00 EST

This talk defines a new class of threats, XML Content Attacks, and differentiates these threats from more general Web services attacks and XML security-based attacks. These three related but distinct threat areas are explained. The talk covers XML Content Attacks with regard to tree-based parsing exploits related to coercive parsing, node-depth attacks, and DOM. XML grammar validation exploits such as schema poisoning and lax-content models are discussed, and why traditional schema validation cannot ensure content-model consistency. Web services attacks like WSDL scanning and parameter tampering (SQL Injection, SOAP array attack) are discussed ? highlighting common mistakes made when applying message-level security (WS-Security).

Building Intelligent Enterprises with Novell's Identity-Driven Computing

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 10:00:00 EST

Companies are now facing complexities dealing with issues such as regulatory compliance and security while still providing for company-wide collaboration between employees, partners, and suppliers. Identity systems are becoming a crucial component of applications, enabling developers to take advantage of a new set of services that know who you are, where you are, what you are trying to do, and can adapt to your changing business needs. Identity-driven computing addresses these problems by applying best practices learned from Novell's leadership in identity management for the management of people to all aspects of an enterprise, including servers, PCs, devices, applications, and even Web services.This presentation will outline identity-driven computing, describe the attributes of an identity-driven application, and discuss steps enterprises can take to make the transition to an identity-driven computing environment.

Web Services Security - A Key Element of SOA Governance

Wed, 16 Feb 2005 09:00:00 EST

SOAs promise a dramatic improvement in IT responsiveness to business needs. Key within this value proposition is the idea that service consumption policies can be configured instead of coded. While the opportunities to positively impact both the top-line and bottom-line are enormous, so are the issues of SOA management, with security being a primary focus of concern. How are users and identities managed? How does existing security infrastructure play in the new world, and how do you bridge from an existing environment to an SOA? How can an enterprise provide auditable yet efficient governance of the publishing, consumption, provisioning, and monitoring of SOA activities? This session will present a real-world look at the SOA landscape, a deep look at the security implications that it embodies, and some emerging best practices in the areas of Web services security, SOA policy, and governance.

Anatomy of a Web Services Attack

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 16:00:00 EST

A broad range of new security threats is facing enterprises implementing XML Web services, leaving the enterprises open to financial risks, loss of property, and tarnished reputations. The basic rules of security - authentication, authorization, and auditing - no longer provide adequate security in the new world of straight-through processing paths into mission-critical systems. What's worse, WSDL documents provide a guide book to security exposure. Most attacks on traditional Web-based applications exploit weaknesses in HTML-enabled custom, or packaged, applications. However, hackers and other malicious users are quickly uncovering new techniques at the SOAP/XML data level that bypass HTML and target weaknesses in Web services programming, technology, and architecture. This session will outline the innovative techniques that hackers use to map out the vulnerabilities of an organization's network, and how Web server security must now complement Web services security in order to provide an adequate defense.

Securing Web Services with WS-Security

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 10:00:00 EST

An up-to-date, comprehensive, and practical discussion of Web services security, and the first to cover the final release of new standards SAML 1.1 and WS-Security. Comprehensive coverage and practical examples of the industry standards XML Signature and XML Encryption will be presented.

Identity in SOA

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 09:00:00 EST

The mainstreaming of SOAs requires a more general approach to the notion of identities - beyond simply central management of people identities and into the realm of managing applications, devices, and other identities that represent entities that are first-class participants in this application network while also providing this as a pluggable service into the larger enterprise SOA. Enterprises should view identity as a service that is ubiquitously available and is a shared infrastructure service necessary for application networking, rather than as being managed by a server, such as an Authentication or Access server. While it makes architectural sense to consider an Identity service, there are business and related drivers that may force the need to deploy such an architecture.