WS-Security is an essential component of the Web services protocol stack. WS-Security provides end-to-end security properties, thereby assuring the participation of nonsecure transport intermediaries in message exchanges, a key advantage in Web-based systems. However, compared to point-to-point secure messaging with TLS, WS-Security has a significant performance penalty. In this paper, we identify several opportunities for optimizing WS-Security.
Robert A. van Engelen, Wei Zhang