Architecting secure Web Services through policies

As Web services begin to dominate the market of distributed computing, securing the pipelines from intruders is becoming a mission, which cannot be considered as trivial anymore. As businesses adopt web services due to its very attractive features like platform independency, ease of implementation, unprecedented support from major vendors and ability of seamlessly interfacing with legacy systems, they unsuspectingly expose themselves into a zone filled with security loop holes which can pose a great threat to confidential data which might be travelling through the channels using these services. This paper proposes a comprehensive security solution for securing Web services through the use of policies. In an era where Web services are building bridges across heterogeneous systems the need of a security solution, which can seamlessly integrate itself into the existing Web service infrastructures of businesses, is becoming more and more apparent. Thus a solution, which can be easily incorporated into the existing infrastructures with minimum cost and effort on the part of the developers and businesses are proposed here.