An Authorization Architecture for Web Services

This paper considers the authorization service requirements for the service oriented architecture and proposes an authorization architecture for Web services. It describes the architectural framework, the administration and runtime aspects of our architecture and its components for secure authorization of Web services as well as the support for the management of authorization information. The proposed architecture has several benefits. It is able to support legacy applications exposed as Web services as well as new Web service based applications built to leverage the benefits offered by the service oriented architecture; it can support multiple access control models and mechanisms and is decentralized and distributed and provides flexible management and administration of Web services and related authorization information. The proposed architecture can be integrated into existing middleware platforms to provide enhanced security to exposed Web services. The architecture is currently being implemented within the .NET framework.