Secure Sessions for Web Services

WS-Security provides basic means to secure SOAP traffic, one envelope at a time. For typical web services, however, using WS-Security independently for each message is rather inefficient; besides, it is often important to secure the integrity of a whole session, as well as each message. To this end, recent specifications provide further SOAP-level mechanisms: WS-SecureConversation introduces security contexts, which can be used to secure sessions between two parties. WS-Trust specifies how security contexts are issued and obtained. We develop a semantics for the main mechanisms of WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation, expressed as a library for TulaFale, a formal scripting language for security protocols. We model typical protocols relying on these mechanisms, and automatically prove their main security properties. We also informally discuss some limitations of these specifications.