A policy-based architecture for web services authentication

With the rapid development of the Internet, web service technology has been extensively used in distributed applications and is highly likely to replace other various technologies for the distributed application development. However, concerning most hard issues of the web services authentication, no proper solutions have been discovered and available for use now. Due to its dynamic and cross-domain characteristics, web services authentication is confronted with new challenges and difficulties. Each service or autonomous domain may have their separate authentication technologies and identity token types. Meanwhile, the same services may adopt different authentication technologies in terms of different application scenarios. Therefore, the difficult question arises as how to design an integrated and flexible architecture to enhance trust in web services. According to our findings, presented in this paper is a policy-based architecture for web services authentication termed PBA4WSA. Compared with the other architectures, the PBA4WSA can better satisfy the characteristics of web services.