Evaluating Benefits and Tradeoffs

The following lists are designed to help you determine whether using OpenSSO Enterprise to secure web services is suitable in your environment.

Benefits

• Based on standards specification as developed by OASIS, Liberty Alliance Project, Web Services Interoperability Organization, World Wide Web Consortium.

• Secures the message over all hops and after the message arrives at its destination.

• Security is fine-grained and can selectively be applied to different portions of a message (and to attachments if using XWSS).

• Can be used in conjunction with intermediaries over multiple hops.

• Is independent of the application environment or transport protocol.

• Securing web services interactions is transparent to the client applications when web service security providers are configured in web or J2EE containers.

Tradeoff

The drawback to using message-level security is that it is relatively complex and adds some overhead to processing.