A Survey of Attacks in the Web Services World

Abstract

In the modern electronic business world, services offered to business partners as well as to customers have become an important company asset. This again produces interests for attacking those services either to paralyze the availability or to gain unauthorized access. Though founding on decades of networking experience, Web Services are not more resistant to security attacks than other open network systems. Quite the opposite is true: Web Services are exposed to attacks well-known from common Internet protocols and additionally to new kinds of attacks targeting Web Services in particular. This chapter presents a survey of different types of such Web Service specific attacks. For each attack a description of the attack execution, the effect on the target and partly the results of practical experiments are given. Additionally, general countermeasures for fending Web Service attacks are shown.