[ggf-ogsa-sec-wg] WS Security wins Excellence award

[Nataraj Nagaratnam <natarajn@us.ibm.com>]

FYI

WS-Security has shared the PC magazine Excellence Award in the Protocols
category with SAML.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,715069,00.asp
                                                                            
                                                                            
                                                                            
                                                                            
 The 19th Annual Awards for Technical Excellence                            
 November 19, 2002                                                          
 Protocols                                                                  
                                                                            
                                                                            
                                                                            
                                                                            
                                                                            
                                                                            
 Winners: SAML and WS-Security                                              
                                                                            
                                                                            
 Securing Web services is no easy task. The same virtues that make Web      
 services so promising for e-business—they're platform-independent,         
 text-based, and self-describing—create major security concerns, giving     
 pause to businesses considering a move to the hot new interoperability     
 technology. Two standards are emerging to secure Web services: Security    
 Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and WS-Security, both proposals submitted 
 to the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information          
 Standards (OASIS). To protect confidentiality, WS-Security relies on XML   
 Encryption, while SAML uses the slower HTTPS. WS-Security protects         
 individual transactions, and the substantial infrastructure required by    
 SAML pays off with single sign-on capability. The Liberty Alliance's       
 authentication solution—Liberty 1.0—builds on SAML, while Microsoft's      
 competing technology, .NET Passport, uses WS-Security. No matter whether   
 these two standards converge or remain separate, the success of Web        
 services in e-business could depend on them. (OASIS, www.oasis-open.org,   
 Click here to read more about SAML and WS-Security.)