Privacy Issues in the Web Services Architecture

Abstract

A Web service is a software system that supports interoperable application-to-application interactions over a network. Web services are based on a set of XML standards such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Recently, there have been increasing demands and discussions about Web services privacy technologies in the industry and research community. To enable privacy protection for Web service consumers across multiple domains and services, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published a document called “Web Services Architecture (WSA) Requirements” that defines some fundamental privacy requirements for Web services. However, no comprehensive solutions to the various privacy issues have been so far defined. For these reasons, this chapter will focus on privacy technologies by first discussing the main privacy issues in WSA and related protocols. Then, this chapter illustrates the standardization efforts going on in the context of privacy for Web services and proposes different technical approaches to tackle the privacy issues.