XML and Web services security standards

Abstract

XML and Web services are widely used in current distributed systems. The security of the XML based communication, and the Web services themselves, is of great importance to the overall security of these systems. Furthermore, in order to facilitate interoperability, the security mechanisms should preferably be based on established standards. In this paper we provide a tutorial on current security standards for XML and Web services. The discussed standards include XML Signature, XML Encryption, the XML Key Management Specification (XKMS), WS-Security, WS-Trust, WS-SecureConversation, Web Services Policy, WS-SecurityPolicy, the eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML), and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML).