Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect's Guide

Types of Security Attacks and Threats

In this section we briefly look at the types of security attacks and threats that are possible within a Web services environment. Since Web services leverage much of the infrastructure developed for Web sites, it is understandable that the types of security breaches that are common for Web sites will also be common for Web services. However, since Web services provide an application programming interface (API) for external agents to interact with it and also provides a description of this API (in the form of WSDL files), Web service environments facilitate and in fact attract attacks. These environments also make it more difficult to detect attacks from legitimate interactions.

Malicious Attacks

As we have ...