Chapter 8. WS-Trust

The WS-Trust standard is based around a centralized security server (the Security Token Service), which is capable of authenticating clients and can issue tokens containing various kinds of authentication and authorization data.

The WS-Trust features of Apache CXF are based on the WS-Trust standard from Oasis:

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-sx/ws-trust/v1.4/ws-trust.html

http://docs.oasis-open.org/ws-sx/ws-trust/v1.4/ws-trust.html

Apart from the WS-Trust specification itself, several other specifications play an important role in the WS-Trust architecture, as follows:

Figure 8.1, “WS-Trust Architecture” shows a general overview of the WS-Trust architecture.

A requestor is an entity that tries to invoke a secure operation over a network connection. In practice, a requestor is typically a Web service client.

A relying party refers to an entity that has some services or resources that must be secured against unauthorized access. In practice, a relying party is typically a Web service.

A security token is a collection of security data that a requestor sends inside a request (typically embedded in the message header) in order to invoke a secure operation or to gain access to a secure resource. In the WS-Trust framework, the notion of a security token is quite general and can be used to describe any block of security data that might accompany a request.

In principle, WS-Trust can be used with the following kinds of security token:

A SAML token is a particularly flexible kind of security token. The SAML specification defines a general-purpose XML schema that enables you to wrap almost any kind of security data and enables you to sign and encrypt part or all of the token.

SAML is a popular choice of token to use in the context of WS-Trust, because SAML has all of the necessary features to support typical WS-Trust authentication scenarios.

A SAML security token is formally defined to consist of a collection of claims. Each claim typically contains a particular kind of security data.

In WS-Trust scenarios, a policy can represent the security configuration of a participant in a secure application. The requestor, the relying party, and the security token service are all configured by policies. For example, a policy can be used to configure what kinds of authentication are supported and required.

The security token service (STS) lies at the heart of the WS-Trust security architecture. In the WS-Trust standard, the following bindings are defined (not all of which are supported by Apache CXF):