Follow up: Online Event: Web Services Security Assessment: the research and the industry perspectives

Web Services Security Assessment:
the research and the industry perspectives

May 27th, 2011
11.30 a.m. (GMT+1)

Web services are nowadays a strategic vehicle for data exchange and content distribution used by a very wide range of organizations. As other web application, web services are so exposed to external  attacks that any existing security vulnerability will most probably be uncovered  and exploited by hackers.  

Moreover, hackers are moving their focus to applications’ code, often improperly implemented, searching for vulnerabilities by exploring applications’ inputs with  specially tampered values that can take advantage of existing vulnerabilities  representing considerable danger to the web service owner.

The main problems  are that the  majority of the developers are not specialized on security and that the common  time-­‐to-­‐market constraints limit an in-­‐depth  testing for vulnerabilities. As a consequence, published studies  show that,in general,web applications and services present dangerous  security flaws. 

This highlight the importance of the role that vulnerability detection tools have in helping the developers to produce less vulnerable code.