SDN-based Runtime Security Enforcement Approach for Privacy Preservation of Dynamic Web Service Composition

Aiming at the privacy preservation of dynamic Web service composition, this paper proposes a SDN-based runtime security enforcement approach for privacy preservation of dynamic Web service composition. The main idea of this approach is that the owner of service composition leverages the security policy model (SPM) to define the access control relationships that service composition must comply with in the application plane, then SPM model is transformed into the low-level security policy model (RSPM) containing the information of SDN data plane, and RSPM model is uploaded into the SDN controller. After uploading, the virtual machine access control algorithm integrated in the SDN controller monitors all of access requests towards service composition at runtime. Only the access requests that meet the definition of RSPM model can be forwarded to the target terminal. Any access requests that do not meet the definition of RSPM model will be automatically blocked by Openflow switches or deleted by SDN controller, Thus, this approach can effectively solve the problems of network-layer illegal accesses, identity theft attacks and service leakages when Web service composition is running. In order to verify the feasibility of this approach, this paper implements an experimental system by using POX controller and Mininet virtual network simulator, and evaluates the effectiveness and performance of this approach by using this system. The final experimental results show that the method is completely effective, and the method can always get the correct calculation results in an acceptable time when the scale of RSPM model is gradually increasing.