Container-level security certification of services

The increasing success of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm has fostered the implementation of complex services, including business processes, via dynamic selection and composition of remote services providing single functionality. Run-time selection and composition of services require the deployment of high-level security standards for the SOA infrastructure, to increase the confidence of both service consumers and providers that the services satisfy their security requirements and behave as expected. In this context, certification can play a fundamental role and provide the evidence that a set of properties hold for a given service. Security certification of services can involve two different aspects: i) the evaluation of the container in which the service is deployed, in terms of compliance with web service security standards and policies; ii) the verification and validation of the service implementation. In this chapter, we focus on the first aspect and we propose an overview of container-level certification of services.