WS-SecurityPolicy


WS-SecurityPolicy is a web services specification, created by IBM and 12 co-authors, that has become an OASIS standard as of version 1.2. It extends the fundamental security protocols specified by the WS-Security, WS-Trust and WS-SecureConversation by offering mechanisms to represent the capabilities and requirements of web services as policies. Security policy assertions are based on the WS-Policy framework.
Policy assertions can be used to require more generic security attributes like transport layer security <TransportBinding>, message level security <AsymmetricBinding> or timestamps, and specific attributes like token types.
Most policy assertion can be found in following categories:
Policies can be used to drive development tools to generate code with certain capabilities, or may be used at runtime to negotiate the security aspects of web service communication. Policies may be attached to WSDL elements such as service, port, operation and message, as defined in WS Policy Attachment.

Sample Policies

Namespaces used by the following XML-snippets:

 xmlns:p="http://www.w3.org/ns/ws-policy"
 xmlns:sp="http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-sx/ws-securitypolicy/200802">
 ...


Include a timestamp:



Use either transport layer security or message level security :


 ...
 ...


To define a SAML assertion as security token:


 
 ...#SAMLV2.0


Issued token assertion of providers with reference to the STS and required token format:


 
 
 http://sampleorg.com/sts
 
 
 
 
 http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/oasis-wss-saml-token-profile-1.0#SAMLAssertionID
 
 ...
 
 ...


Specify that message header and body need to be signed, and attachments are left unsigned:


 ?
 *
...

Other WS policy languages

The term Web Services Security Policy Language is used for two different XML-based languages:
  1. As described above, based on the WS-Policy framework, as defined in, published as version 1.3 in Feb. 2009
  2. WSPL, based on , but that was not finalized.