  It is known that the exchange of information between web applications is done
by means of the SOAP protocol. Securing this protocol is obviously a vital
issue for any computer network. However, when it comes to cloud computing
systems, the sensitivity of this issue rises, as the clients of system, release
their data to the cloud. XML signature is employed to secure SOAP messages.
However, there are also some weak points that have been identified, named as
XML signature wrapping attacks, which have been categorized into four major
groups; Simple Ancestry Context Attack, Optional element context attacks,
Sibling Value Context Attack, Sibling Order Context. In this paper, two
existing methods, for referencing the signed part of SOAP Message, named as ID
referencing and XPath method, are analyzed and examined. In addition, a new
method is proposed and tested, to secure the SOAP message. In the new method,
the XML any signature wrapping attack is prevented by employing the concept of
XML digital signature on the SOAP message. The results of conducted experiments
show that the proposed method is approximately three times faster than the
XPath method and even a little faster than ID.
