Conclusion
This article concludes my seven-part series on Web services security. When I began writing this, there was an air of pessimism in the industry, and there were suspicions that companies were playing corporate politics instead of advancing in cooperation. But the scenario has changed since then (because of the lull in the economy and other reasons), and the industry is coming together to provide a common direction to Web services security.
WS Securityinitially brewed by Microsoft, IBM, and VeriSignis now under OASIS review, and is perhaps the most important event testifying to the change in industry attitude. Down the line, we can expect interesting specifications covering wide-ranging areas such as WS-Policy, WS-Trust, WS-Federation, etc.
What is more heartening is the fact that the two major camps of distributed computing (Sun and Microsoft) are hopefully traveling in the same direction, as far as Web services security is concerned.