Server-Side Streaming Processing of Secured MTOM Attachments

The W3C recommendation MTOM is the defac to standard for transferring binary data in SOAP protocol elements as attachments. The distinguished feature provided by MTOM is-compared to other SOAP attachment specifications-the efficient transfer of binary data without breaking the XML info set. This property allows e.g. the application of XML Security mechanisms to the SOAP message including the attachment parts. The efficiency of SOAP processing, especially when SOAP messages include security primitives, is an active area of research. However, the work available on the efficient processing of secured SOAP attachments is sparse. This paper aims to close this gap and contributes a scheme to process secured MTOM attachments on the server-side in a streaming manner. The proposed approach is in conformance with the underlying standards and compatible with the major research and development activities in stream-based SOAP security processing. Evaluations based on a prototype implementation, show that the introduced scheme increases the performance by a factor of at least 2 and reduces the memory requirements for large attachments by a factor of approximately 20.