The Java EE 6 Tutorial, Volume I

Message-Layer Security

In message-layer security, security information is contained within the SOAP message and/or SOAP message attachment, which allows security information to travel along with the message or attachment. For example, a portion of the message may be signed by a sender and encrypted for a particular receiver. When the message is sent from the initial sender, it may pass through intermediate nodes before reaching its intended receiver. In this scenario, the encrypted portions continue to be opaque to any intermediate nodes and can only be decrypted by the intended receiver. For this reason, message-layer security is also sometimes referred to as end-to-end security.

The advantages of message-layer security include the following:

The disadvantage of using message-layer security is that it is relatively complex and adds some overhead to processing.

The Enterprise Server supports message security using Metro, a web services stack that uses Web Services Security (WSS) to secure messages. Because this message security is specific to Metro and is not a part of the Java EE platform, this tutorial does not discuss using WSS to secure messages. See the Metro User's Guide at https://metro.dev.java.net/guide/. Other sources of information for message security include Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Administration Guide and Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server v3 Application Development Guide.