.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 sec... (more)
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 ... (more)
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... (more)