Service Oriented Architecture For Dummies®

Chapter 12. SOA Security

In This Chapter

• All about authentication

• Identity management and SOA

• IT asset management and SOA

• Security at large

• SOA security in summary

In the Dark Ages in Europe, when you wanted to be secure, you built a castle with thick walls and surrounded it with a moat. (Can you tell Robin wrote this chapter? He's the Brit.) Also, you needed a sensible number of soldiers to man the battlements. If you had a whole city that needed defending, such as London or Paris or Constantinople, you built walls 'round the whole city. If the city was attacked, all able-bodied men manned the walls, firing arrows and pouring boiling oil on the attackers. In those days, security was all about the perimeter . . . until cannons were invented, that is.

In the Dark Ages of computing — a time when only mainframes existed — the tactics were very similar. You built electronic walls and moats to defend the mainframe. You defended them with passwords and permissions rather than arrows and boiling oil, but it was a perimeter defense just the same. Even when networking began to make an impact, the same digital defenses were used. The whole networks — including the PCs — were like lots of little castles all connected together, all protected by local passwords and permissions. But then the Internet made its appearance and things changed utterly. . . .

With the Internet, security problems exploded. Attackers were suddenly armed with a whole set of electronic weapons and tricks like password crackers, ...