Web Services Security and Privacy

Web services are becoming widely deployed to implement the automation of business processes such as supply chain management, inventory tracking, and healthcare management, just to name a few. A Web service is a new breed of web application that supports interoperable application-to-application interaction over a network based on a set of XML standards. This new architecture and new set of protocols brings a new set of security challenges such as confidentiality, integrity, anonymity, authentication, authorization and availability. As security has become an essential component for all information systems, several security solutions for Web services data have been proposed such as WS-Security, SAML and XACML. To enable privacy protection for Web service consumers across multiple domains and services, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published a document called "Web Services Architecture (WSA) Requirements" that defines some specific privacy requirements for Web services as a future research topic.