Building Dependable and Secure Web Services

Web Services offer great promise for integrating and automating software applications within and between enterprises over the Internet. However, ensuring that Web Services can satisfy their clients’ requests when their clients need them is a real challenge. In this paper we describe dependability technologies, including transparent SOAP connection failover, replication, checkpointing and message logging, in addition to reliable messaging and transaction management for which there exist Web Services specifications. We also present security technologies, including encryption and digital signatures for which Web Services specifications exist, as well as other security technologies We discuss how these technologies can be applied to the components of a typical Web Services architecture to render business activities that span multiple enterprises dependable and secure.