A team of researchers from Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign have put together a preliminary proposal for securing Web services with SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) extensions which will work with a variety of authentication and encryption schemes. Called WS-Security (Web Services Security Language), the proposed specification is said to be a general-purpose kit for developing security mechanisms tailored to individual needs. (The authors clearly realize that such a kit does not in itself guarantee security, since it may be implemented well or poorly.)
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