What Is Web Services Security (WS Security)?

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If you're a web developer, you've heard of WS-Security. It's one of those things that is often just there, and you don't realize how important it is until you need it. WS-Security relies on WS-Trust and WS-Policy to provide authentication, message integrity checks and encryption capabilities for secure communication between two parties. Web services security (WS Security) is a specification that defines how security measures are implemented in web services to protect them from external attacks. Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems developed the Web Services Security standard in 2004 to define an interoperable framework for message security within SOAP-based web services. The bar provides a set of XML-based bindings to support Transport Layer Security (TLS) as an underlying security protocol for secure communication over HTTP or any other transport layer. Web services are excellent, but they could be better. That's just the way we like it. We love that Web services are independent of any hardware and software implementations. We can easily use them to connect our applications, no matter what infrastructure they run on. We must be flexible enough to accommodate new security mechanisms and provide alternative tools if an approach is unsuitable. As SOAP-based messages traverse multiple intermediaries, security protocols need to be able to identify fake nodes and prevent data interpretation at any nodes. So much work goes into making a web service secure: choosing digital signatures for non-repudiation and Kerberos for authentication while ensuring they're easy enough to implement so developers can get off the ground with them quickly. That's where WS-Security comes in! WS-Security combines the best approaches to tackle different security problems by allowing developers to customize a particular security solution for a part of the problem so they don't have to reinvent the wheel whenever they want extra protection for their data.

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