Businesses are rapidly adopting Web services to provide new levels of integration between applications. By comparison with earlier data communications techniques, Web services are faster and cheaper to develop, quicker to deploy, and easier to adapt to emerging business needs.

Although these benefits are real, and more and more companies are adopting Web services for that reason, the same characteristics that make Web services quicker and cheaper to deploy, more robust and more flexible than older methods, also make them vulnerable to new kinds of security risks and opportunities.

This paper discusses the special security challenges posed by the use of Web services, and how to secure networks against them.