Secure Service-oriented Architecture Research Articles

Development of SOA-based WebGIS framework for education sector

The applications of Geographic Information System (GIS) in the education sector are increasing day by day. The geospatial information can be published, discovered, searched, analyzed, and displayed through webGIS-based applications. Lack of an open source geospatial resource-based platform for data sharing, discovery, and service delivery in the education sector is a critical issue in managing the education of large population in India. The use of open geospatial consortium (OGC) developed open standards for geospatial web services will result in the interoperability of geographic information. In this paper, an interoperable and secure service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based webGIS framework is developed to handle the technical and non-technical issues in the education sector. In this research work, spatial analysis on schools is performed along with the design and development of webGIS framework using SOA, OGC standards, and open source software. The developed webGIS framework, acronym as EduGIS, is interoperable and secure which is implemented for the education sector. The development of webGIS framework is based upon three-tier thin client architecture. The present research work has investigated an optimized adoption of various free and open source software like Quantum GIS, GeoServer, Apache Tomcat, PostGIS, and uDig in different tiers of developed webGIS framework. The interoperability of developed EduGIS ensures that it can be shared across different technologies, data, platforms, and organizations. The development of open source-based webGIS framework will serve as a means of reducing licensing costs in developing countries like India and will promote indigenous technological development for primary education in rural areas.

Secure and quality-of-service-supported service-oriented architecture for mobile cloud handoff process

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) combines the features of mobile computing, cloud computing, and wireless networks to create the healthy computational resources to mobile cloud users. The aim of MCC is to execute the highly attractive mobile applications on a plethora of mobile cellular telephones, with highly rich user experience. From the perspective of mobile computing, Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning depends on the efficiency of the handoff process. Thus, it is highly important to introduce an energy efficient and secure handoff process to improve the performance. In this paper, we propose a Secure Seamless Fast Handoff (SSFH) scheme to improve the energy efficiency and the QoS in the MCC. The proposed scheme consists of four layers: application layer, service layer, infrastructure layer, and media layer. These four layers collectively handle the security, energy-efficiency, and the QoS. Existing service-oriented architectures designed for the MCC are based on the symmetric encryption protocols to support the application layer. However, it is much easier for an adversary to expose the symmetric key and gain access to the confidential data. The application layer is secured using a combination of both attribute-based encryption and an asymmetric encryption cryptography. To extend the mobile lifetime, energy detection (ED) model is deployed at the infrastructure layer to detect the energy level of the mobile devices prior to the pre-registration process. Furthermore, a dual authentication process is performed on the service and at the application layer to minimize the possibility of identity-high jacked or impersonation attack. The media layer supports the secure handoff process using policy enforcement module that allows only legitimate users to complete the re-registration process after initiating the handoff. Thus, a significant amount of the bandwidth and energy could be preserved. Finally, the secure service-oriented architecture is programmed using C++ platform and the results are compared with other well-known existing service-oriented architectures. The experimental results confirm the validity and the effectiveness of our proposed architecture.

Securing services in nomadic computing environments

This work addresses the existing research gap regarding the security of service oriented architectures and their integration in the context of nomadic computing. The state of the art of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) is thoroughly investigated to understand what secure service provision means for different SOAs and whether an established notion of secure SOA existed. Based on the analysis of existing SOAs, we define a set of requirements for securing services among different nomadic computing domains. Such requirements concern the security of service registration and that of the discovery and delivery phases. The surveyed SOAs are then evaluated in the light of the defined requirements, revealing interesting observations about how current SOAs address security issues. The second part of this work addresses the research issue of achieving secure service provision in a nomadic computing environment characterized by a number of heterogeneous service oriented architectures. A solution is presented in the form of an architectural model, named Secure Nomadic Computing Architecture. The model relies on a novel three-phase discovery-delivery protocol which allows the enforcement of a number of security requirements, identified as a result of the first part of the work. Finally, we present an exemplary implementation of the proposed architectural model developed within the context of a distributed management information system for the discovery of digital educational content.

On The Development of Secure Service-Oriented Architectures to Support Medical Research

In this article we report upon our experiences of developing Web-services based infrastruc-tures within two e-health projects. The first—a small demonstrator project funded by the UK’s National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI)—is concerned with facilitating the aggregation of different types of data (specifically, MRI scans and histopathology slides) to aid the treatment of colorectal cancer; the second—a rather larger project funded by the UK’s Medical Research Council (MRC)—is concerned with the development of a virtual research environment to support neuro-imaging research. In both cases, the underlying infrastructures are being developed by a team that is based in Oxford; it is the experiences of this team that we report upon in this article. We also report upon how we have considered the future potential for our systems interoperating with other systems which are deployed within the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).