Biologically Inspired Security as a Service for Service-Oriented Middleware

Service-Oriented computing is a new programming paradigm based on service-oriented architecture that uses web services as its basic building block. Service-Oriented Middleware is a middleware layer that was developed to support service-oriented computing by allowing the flexible integration and operation of web services within the service-oriented computing environment. With the wide adoption of service-oriented computing, web service applications are no longer contained within tightly controlled environments, and thus could be subjected to malicious attacks, such as Denial of Service attacks. In this paper, we propose a generic security service that protects web services against denial of service attacks at the service-oriented middleware layer. Our security service draws on a bio-inspired framework that was developed to counteract denial of service at the network layer. To evaluate our work we have developed a prototype that showed that our proposed security service was able to detect denial of service attacks targeting a web service.