Experience Report: Design and Implementation of a Component-Based Protection Architecture for ASP.NET Web Services

Abstract

Abstract. This report reflects, from a software engineering perspective, on the experience of designing and implementing protection mechanisms for ASP.NET Web services. The limitations of Microsoft ASP.NET container security mechanisms render them inadequate for hosting enterprise-scale applications that have to be protected according to diverse and/or complex applicationspecific security policies. In this paper we report on our experience of designing and implementing a component-based architecture for protecting enterprisegrade Web service applications hosted by ASP.NET. Due to its flexibility and extensibility, this architecture enables the integration of ASP.NET into the organizational security infrastructure with less effort by Web service developers. The architecture has been implemented in a real-world security solution. This paper also contributes a best practice on constructing flexible and extensible authentication and authorization logic for Web services by using Resource Access Decision and Attribute Function (AF) architectural styles. Furthermore, the lessons learned from our design and implementation experiences are discussed throughout the paper.