Secure Communication Infrastructure for Object Repositories and Web Services

In this paper we present the design and implementation of a lightweight security infrastructure, for the federated security, that enables organization to share resources based on the trust federation between several organizations. The infrastructure consists of an augmented security layer placed on top of the Web Service protocol. The solution utilizes the latest WS-Security specifications and, at the infrastructure level, is compatible with Shibboleth – a federated security solution for Web resources. In order to illustrate the potential of the infrastructure, we also describe the pilot application: an object repository with complex access policies.