Implementing and securing web services in context-aware pervasive environment

The hype in the past few years for medium-size and large companies involved in service or solution delivery is about service-oriented-architecture (SOA). Web services respond to the need to provide loosely-couple software services to cater for the business needs. This involved further abstraction of software component by providing remote users an interface defined in XML, more commonly known as the Web service definition language (WSDL) instead of directly accessing binaries. In this paper we explore recent findings in the implementation of Web services in context-aware areas. The security issues that may surface are identified and methods of countering those security threats are proposed. The main emphasis is the challenge to design effective access control and trust-based models for Web services environment.