1. XML Security Processing With VTD- XML Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare Feb-18, 10:05am

2. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare XML Security: The definition XML Security refers to the set of practices to ensure the security and authenticity of XML/SOAP payload. Is mostly XML message processing Some common keywords of, or related to, XML security – XML encryption – XML signature – SAML – Single sign on Essential to the success of Web Services.

3. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare Challenges of XML security processing Existing techniques are based on DOM or SAX – Slow: DOM doesn’t give more than 3~5 MB/sec – Difficult to use: SAX doesn’t build trees in memory, unsuitable for SOAP header processing But there is more. Consider the following: – No incremental update with either DOM or SAX – Repetitive parsing for every message stop

4. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare The Problem Statement The biggest problem of current XML processing concerns how an XML message is tokenized. – For historical reasons, a token is a string terminated with a NULL. – Tokenize XML this way creates lots of string objects – Object creation is the biggest performance killer – No way to support incremental update

5. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare The Solution: Virtual Token Descriptor Alternative tokenization technique exists, i.e., using offset and length. Object creation cost also can be minimized by using fixed length integers Virtual Token Descriptor (VTD) is a binary format specifying how to tokenized “non-extractively.” VTD records are 64-bit integers that encode the starting offset, length, token type and nesting depth of tokens in XML

6. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare Benefits of VTD Potentially very high performance – By reducing per-object memory/processing overhead – Custom ASIC implementation Memory Resident: Random access possible Incremental Update Efficient content extraction Inherent persistent: Avoid repetitive parsing

7. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare Introducing VTD-XML VTD-XML is the open source (GPL) XML processing API built on the concept of VTD. Current version 0.8 Hosted at http://vtd-xml.sf.nethttp://vtd-xml.sf.net Have all the benefits of VTD Implementation available in both Java and C, delivering 25~35MB/sec sustained parsing performance on a 1.5GHz processor. Ideally suited for XML security application

8. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare VTD-XML’s User Experience Highest performance parsing available in software Random access capable meaning user-friendliness The most efficient when one wants to add, delete or update XML payload The most efficient to extract content from XML payload VTD, a natural index of XML, can be sent along with XML itself to avoid repetitive parsing. ASIC implementation delivers 2Gb/Sec performance.

9. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare Case Study 1: Change a single token value Before After

10. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare Case Study 2: Inserting SAML into XML Payload 2 1 4 3

11. Jimmy Zhang XimpleWare Summary VTD-XML is the next generation XML processing API that fundamentally solves multiple problems of XML security processing.