A Decision Support System for Selecting Secure Web Services

Abstract

Web service is becoming an important area of business processing and research for enterprise systems. Various Web service providers currently offer diverse computing services ranging from entertainment, finance, and health care to real-time application. With the widespread proliferation of Web Services, not only delivering secure services has become a critical challenge for the service providers, but users face constant challenges in selecting the appropriate Web services for their enterprise application systems. Security has become an important issue for information systems (IS) managers for a secure integration of Web services with their enterprise systems. Security is one of the determining factors in selecting appropriate Web services. The need for run-time composition of enterprise systems with third-party Web services requires a careful selection process of Web services with security assurances consistent with the enterprise business goal. Selection of appropriate Web services with required security assurances is essentially a problem of choice among several alternative services available in the market. The IS managers have little control of the actual security behavior of the third-party Web services, however, they can control the selection of right services which could likely comply their security requirements. Selecting third-party Web services arbitrarily over the Internet is critical as well as risky.