Securing SOAP e-services

Abstract.

Remote service invocation via HTTP and XML promises to become an important component of the Internet infrastructure. Work is ongoing in the W3C XML Protocol Working Group to define a common standard, and solutions like SOAP and XML-RPC are already used in a few situations, demonstrating the potential. However, no standard technique for access control security is currently defined for these protocols. In this paper, we propose an approach that relies on the XML structure of SOAP requests to support fine-grained authorizations at the level of individual XML elements and attributes that comprise a SOAP call. The result is a simple yet general technique to specify and enforce fine-grained access control for e-services.