A gateway to web services security - Securing SOAP with proxies

Integrating applications and resources using Web Services increases the exposure of critical resources. Consequently, the introduction of Web Services requires that additional effort be spent on assessing the corresponding risks and establishing appropriate security mechanisms. This paper explains the main challenges for securing Web Services and summarizes emerging standards. The most important of these, WS-Security, defines a message-based security model for SOAP that is suitable for achieving end-to-end security in environments with multiple trust domains. We propose one particular, gateway-based approach to implementing Web Services security, and compare it to other approaches.