XML Security Introduction*
- There is a requirement to ensure the integrity (via signature) and
confidentiality (via encryption) of parts of XML
documents.
- Operating on a "bucket of bits" is easy. Operating on parts of XML
documents requires the identification and processing of XML in both an
abstract (data model) and consistently serialized (octets) manner.
- These activities are not only applications using XML, they also must
address questions about XML, such as selecting subsets of a document, and
then canonicalizing them.
- This is different from access control, authentication and authorization
which have fewer issues with XML, but face tricky questions about
semantics.
