A Survey on Quantitative Evaluation of Web Service Security

The number of web services available on the Internet has grown rapidly. Service consumers face a hard decision over which service to choose among the available ones. Security holds a key after various vulnerabilities have been exploited by attackers on number of notable web services. This paper carries out a survey on how security has been expressed and promised for web services, through both the Web Service Description Language and Service Level Agreements. It reviews existing technologies used for comparing individual web services, as well as for service compositions. Taking security into account further complicates the already difficult process of choosing the right service. The paper reveals that despite existing efforts, a quantitative solution needs to be established urgently in order to help service consumers to choose the most secure service for them to use.