Adapting web services security standards for mobile and wireless environments

Abstract

Web services are an important way for enterprises to interoperate. They are also becoming important for user access to services that depend on location and they are appearing in mobile devices. We consider the security standards needed for the use of web services in wireless networks. Web services security standards are used for the secure design of the communications between a web service and a mobile client and for the storage of the web service and its data. However, because those standards are designed to be flexible, they are also complex and verbose, and most often difficult to understand and implement. In addition, wireless devices have specific technological constraints and their own standards. We show here the use of patterns as a way to adapt web services security standards to the wireless environment. We also present a new pattern for the Liberty Alliance PAOS service. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.