NewsForge: Securing Web Services: Foundations and Specifications

“Web services, by definition, are particularly vulnerable to
breaches in security. The flow of potentially sensitive data not
only between machines, but between enterprises and across untrusted
networks, presents the need for special attention to areas such as
message confidentiality, message integrity, authentication, and
authorization. Additionally, since Web services are well suited to
business-to-business communications and cooperation, there should
be some way to enforce trust relationships between business
partners. Finally, Web services are used not only by humans, but by
other Web services as well. The high degree of automation required
for interaction between Web services requires well-designed
software architectures, preferably built upon well-designed
standards.

“Since Web services are designed to be able to operate over
HTTP, one can certainly employ HTTP-based security mechanisms such
as HTTP authentication and SSL/TLS…”

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