SeAAS - A Reference Architecture for Security Services in SOA

Decentralized security models and distributed infrastructures of scenarios based on Service Oriented Architectures make the enforcement of security policies a key challenge - all the more so for business processes spanning over multiple enterprises. The current practice to implement security functionality exclusively at the endpoint places a significant processing burden on the endpoint, renders maintenance and management of the distributed security infrastructures cumbersome, and impedes interoperability with external service requester. To meet these challenges, the authors propose a reference security architecture that transposes the model of Software as a Service to the security domain and thereby realizes SEcurity as a Service (SeAAS).