A team of researchers from Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign have put together a preliminary proposal for securing Web services with SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) extensions which will work with a variety of authentication and encryption schemes.

Called WS-Security (Web Services Security Language), the proposed specification is said to be a general-purpose kit for developing security mechanisms tailored to individual needs. (The authors clearly realize that such a kit does not in itself guarantee security, since it may be implemented well or poorly.)

The document provides a fairly solid list of problems along with examples of how they might be addressed with WSS. Some are better than others, and the team is soliciting criticism and suggestions from outside, though there doesn't appear to be a convenient link in the document to a contact person for the project.

The document shows considerable awareness of the technical pitfalls, and makes a decent argument that something along these lines is better than nothing. The goal, obviously, is to make Internet communications confidential, tamper-proof, and reliably authenticated. Insofar as that can be accomplished without making it a compulsory regime, or a de facto compulsory regime by virtue of the colossal marketing and communications might of the three companies involved, we're all in favor of it.

"WS-Security...is designed to be used as the basis for the construction of a wide variety of security models including PKI, Kerberos, and SSL. Specifically, WS-Security provides support for multiple security tokens, multiple trust domains, multiple signature formats, and multiple encryption technologies," the authors say.

That's a claim which needs to be examined closely. It's not difficult to imagine how a trio like this could promote each other's interests to the detriment of competitors with a scheme like WSS. On the other hand, if it really turns out as flexible as is claimed, then I can't really fault it unless it ultimately fails to live up to its technical goals.

One is naturally, and rightly, wary when heavyweight corporations join forces to issue a specification which could affect millions of users. But so long as WSS remains a contribution and not a mandate, and so long as it doesn't inhibit research into alternative approaches, and so long as it doesn't become chiefly a platform for triangular business promotion, there can be no harm in having another set of tools to choose from. It might even develop into something quite good -- you never know. ®