The security and dependability of cloud applications require strong confidence in the communication protocol used to access web resources. The mainstream service providers
nowadays are shifting to REST-based services in the detriment of SOAP-based ones. REST proposes a lightweight approach to consume resources with no specific encapsulation, thus
lacking of meta-data descriptions for security requirements. Currently, the security of RESTful services relies on ad-hoc security mechanisms (whose implementation is error-prone) or on the transport layer security (offering poor flexibility). We introduce the REST security protocol to provide secure service communication, together with its performance analysis when compared to equivalent WS-Security configuration.
