Jeannine Hall Gailey

.NET Passport is a Microsoft-operated service that provides Internet authentication for Web sites, no matter what kind of devices they use for access. It provides reliable Internet authentication and allows users to sign in once to access a variety of .NET Passport-enabled Web sites. In addition, users can save time by using Passport data when registering at new Passport-enabled Web sites. Developers don't have to build and maintain custom authentication mechanisms - Microsoft does the work. Microsoft launched .NET Passport in 1999, and there are now more than 200 million .NET Passport accounts and over four billion authentications per month. As a precursor for future Web services, .NET Passport has allowed Microsoft to deal with problems of scalability, privacy, and security. Although it's sometimes been a rocky road, they probably now have a better idea of what t... (more)

Advanced Web Services Security and Microsoft WSE

As we move from the "Hello World" days of Web services toward development that can truly support the enterprise, there are some advanced functional requirements for Web services, including secure messaging, reliable messaging, and Web service policies. Since interoperability is the "Holy Grail" of XML and Web services, we must maintain this interoperability while supporting such advanced Web service functionalities. We can do this by developing and promoting the widespread industry adoption of so-called "advanced" Web service specifications. While you might envision creating a ... (more)

Advanced Web Services Policies & Microsoft WSE

While widely adopted or standardized security protocols are great for interoperability, a set of SOAP message header elements as well as a few new elements that belong in the message body are outside the scope of the existing mechanism for publishing service descriptions, which is WSDL. In my previous article (WSJ, Vol. 4, issue 3), I covered the basic tenets of the WS-Security (recently renamed by OASIS as SOAP Message Security). This specification leverages existing XML security functionality to enable a uniform way to implement security for SOAP messages. WS-Security implements... (more)