Roxanne,

I'm only a little farther on the WS-Security path than you seem to be, so
don't think I can provide answers to all your questions.

"Roxanne Yee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on 07/08/2008 08:15:24 PM:
> P.S. This might sound stupid, but what is the difference between a
> user and an encryption user?

I think I can answer that: I'm assuming you are talking about XML entities
being read by Rampart for configuration.
In that case, <user> refers to the certificate alias used for signing a
message while, as Nandana mentioned, <encryptionUser> refers to the
certificate alias used for encryption the message.

> If I wanted to implement the most basic of WSS, how would I go about
> doing this?

I'm not sure there's any such thing as most basic of WSS.

Some might define this as transport-level security using SSL/HTTPS, perhaps
with basic server authentication. This is basically the same as when you
have to log into a secure web page and can be done without WS-Security and
Rampart.

But once you're into WS-Security (WSS4J/Rampart) it all depends on what
your requirements are. A typical configuration might timestamp, sign and
encrypt messages, but there are many variations to that and while they
might by typical, they are not simple.

> I've read many tutorials, but the don't
> seem to given a thorough enough explanation of what each tag and
> variable name does.

I've been reading up on this stuff for six months and I haven't found any
such reference!

I can recommend one book that I found very useful:
http://www.agileskills2.org/DWSAA/index.html
And he goes step-by-step through adding signatures and encryption to a web
service.

Other suggestions:

Peruse the articles at WSO2.org, if you haven't already. Go to a page like
http://wso2.org/library/articles, scroll to the bottom and click on terms
in the tag cloud that are of interest (WS-Security).

And, although it's time consuming, when I couldn't find answers, I wrote
little test services to experiment with aspects of WSS until I felt like I
understood them well enough.

I hope this has been at least a little help!

- Steve

______________________________________________
Steve Gruverman, Programmer
IntelliCare, Inc. | A Medco Health Solutions Company

500 Southborough Drive | South Portland ME 04106
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