Implementation and Performance of WS-Security

This article describes performance improvements for the Web Services Security (WS-Security) specification. In the course of its development and performance measurement, we identified bottlenecks in the XML parsing and public key operations such as RSA signature and encryption. We are working on minimizing the impact of both of these bottlenecks. We implemented a stream-based WS-Security processor and showed its efficiency in XML parsing, in terms of both the processing time and the memory usage. In addition, we introduced the Web Services Secure Conversation (WS-SecureConversation) to avoid expensive public key operations.