Francois Lascelles

Imagine a fresh business relationship between ACME Corporation and Partner. As a result of this relationship, ACME wants to grant Partner limited access to one of its core internal applications. They do this, naturally, by exposing a Web service. Why Identity Federation? Boris (an employee at Partner) sends a SOAP request to the ACME Web service along with some password or proof-of-possession type credentials. Because Boris's identity is managed outside of ACME, those credentials cannot be authenticated using ACME's authentication infrastructure. To circumvent this issue, one could imagine a setup where the ACME Web service authenticates Boris's credentials by connecting to Partner's authentication services. Another alternative might involve some sort of directory repli... (more)

WS Security Performance

The WS Secure Conversation specification describes a mechanism letting multiple parties establish a context (using the WS Trust Request Security Token standard) and secure subsequent SOAP exchanges. Each WS Secure Conversation session has an associated shared secret. Instead of using this shared secret directly to sign and encrypt the conversation's messages, symmetric keys are derived f... (more)