Research And Application Of XML Security

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language. It is a set of principles of semantic mark. These marks split a document to many parts, and identify those parts. Because it allows the industry-specific mark-able language to be developed and was represented by the simplest ASCII text which is convenient to be read and transported, so XML document now was used widely as a carrier of exchanging information, especially in B2B applications. Since the security in information exchange in business applications has to be ensured, so besides the functionality of carrier of exchanging information, XML document has to provide the supports of aspects of security.This dissertation will discuss mainly the security of XML document in Web Services. Since the document with XML format will be used to carry data in Web Services applications, this dissertation will discuss how to apply the security factors to XML document. Compares to encryption and signature of normal document, XML document has some specific characteristics. Because of the characteristic of element based, this dissertation will discuss encryption and signature of XML document in three kind of granularity, namely encryption and signature to single element, encryption and signature to some elements and encryption and signature to whole document, and then introduce how to use these three kind of granularity. Besides the part of encryption and signature, key management of XML document also has some specific characteristics. This dissertation will discuss how to apply key management based on XML Key Management Specification (XKMS), and this specification is based on Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), but XKMS provides consistent interfaces for interpretation. When finishing the discussion of security of XML, this dissertation will give some examples how to apply the security solution to Web Services application, and then take SOAP message as an example to introduce the encryption , signature and key management.The general principles of encryption and signature of XML document are almost the same with that of other information; however, based on some unique features of XML document, we have to take some special measures to implement it. This dissertation will discuss how to implement above security factors in XML document, and give a solution which meets the entire requirement.