Securing Web Services Using XML Signature and XML Encryption

This paper is aimed to evaluate the importance of XML Signature and XML Encryption for WS-Security. In today’s e-business scenario, organizations are investing a huge amount of their resources in Web Services. Web Service Transactions are done mainly through plain-text XML formats like SOAP and WSDL, hence hacking them is not a tedious task. XML Signature and XML Encryption ensure security to XML documents as well as retain the structure of the documents, thereby making it easy to implement them. These two methods are evaluated on the parameters of authentication, authorization, integration, confidentiality and non-repudiation.