SOA Security

It is true that security is important in any system. SOA brings in additional security concerns as well rising out of the very openness that makes it attractive. If we apply security principles blindly, we shut ourselves of the benefits of SOA. Therefore, we need to understand which security models and techniques are right for SOA. This book provides such an understanding.

Usually, security is seen as an esoteric topic that is better left to experts. While it is true that security requires expert attention, everybody, including software developers, designers, architects, IT administrators and managers need to do tasks that require very good understanding of security topics. Fortunately, traditional security techniques have been around long enough for people to understand and apply them in practice. This, however, is not the case with SOA Security.

Anyone seeking to implement SOA Security is today forced to dig through a maze of inter-dependent specifications and API docs that assume a lot of prior experience on the part of readers. Getting started on a project is hence proving to be a huge challenge to practitioners. This book seeks to change that. It provides bottom-up understanding of security techniques appropriate for use in SOA without assuming any prior familiarity with security topics on the part of the reader.

Unlike most other books about SOA that merely describe the standards, this book helps you get started immediately by walking you through sample code that illustrates how real life problems can be solved using the techniques and best practices described in standards. Whereas standards discuss all possible variations of each security technique, this book focusses on the 20% of variations that are used 80% of the time. This keeps the material covered in the book simple as well as self-sufficient for all readers except the most advanced.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Good start before securing SOA, 2008-06-13
The main goal of this book (as stated in introduction section) is to give a reader good background knowledge on security in order to facilitate the implementation of security in SOA-based systems. This book is not for security experts, it is more for people who have to deal with security without having previous experience. It helps to answer the questions like how to secure collaborating Web services, what are the common practices.
Nevertheless, the book does not cover all the topics, however, mostly the basic ones. I found this book helpful to understand the fundamental instruments used in SOA security and continued with my own more specific and advanced solutions.


3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

good book, 2008-05-02
Security is indespensable for web services, but difficult to understand and use. There are too many standatds relevant to security, W3C standards and OASIS. I think to understand whole structure need much time. It seems architecture or principle is required to consistent understanding. This book is good to grasp security standard structure. It is regrettable that this book seems written before 2007, the rush of new standards. I hope this book is maintained to the latest standards. Nonetheless it is good for readers to understand security standards structure.


6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

Disappointing title., 2008-02-17
If you are really serious about building security to your SOA stack of applications, then this book would offer only a hello world to security. All you find is a full-blownup security chapter for XML Web services beyond that nothing more. More importantly this book is completely disorganized...all I saw is the basic XML Web services security using out-of-box Axis examples. To the most disappointment, there is no chapter to show how to put-to-gether all these APIs in a real world SOA (as they claim in the title). Why should I read the book if it is repeating the API examples from Axis. This book is nothing but a theoretical junk with no proof. After browsing all the pages, I don't find anything which show how to build a SOA security architecture. The word security is abused and does'nt make sense for this title.


6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

Misleading title and poor examples, 2008-02-08
This book is titled wrong. This books claims coverage on building SOA security, it does not dig into the security features of SOA. Particularly there is no discussion on strategies for securing BPM workflows, SOA governance,identity mgmt via SSO and federation etc and how to ensure security at all integration tiers. This book only offers security examples using Apache Axis beyond that YOU WILL BE BORED.


4 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

Detailed hands-on book, 2008-01-25
This is an excellent book with a lot of detail. The first few chapters given a good background on SOA and Security issues and challenges around Services.

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