Penetration Testing Tool for Web Services Security

Abstract—XML-based SOAP Web Services are a widely used technology, which allows the users to execute remote opera-tions and transport arbitrary data. It is currently adapted in Service Oriented Architectures, cloud interfaces, management of federated identities, eGovernment, or millitary services. The wide adoption of this technology has resulted in an emergence of numerous – mostly complex – extension specifications. Naturally, this has been followed by a rise in large number of Web Services attacks. They range from specific Denial of Service attacks to attacks breaking interfaces of cloud providers [1], [2] or confidentiality of encrypted messages [3]. By implementing common web applications, the developers evaluate the security of their systems by applying different penetration testing tools. However, in comparison to the well-known attacks as SQL injection or Cross Site Scripting, there exist no penetration testing tools for Web Services specific attacks. This was the motivation for developing the first automated penetration testing tool for Web Services called WS-Attacker. In this paper we give an overview of our design decisions and provide evaluation of four Web Services frameworks and their resistance against WS-Addressing spoofing and SOAPAction spoofing attacks