Chapter 9: Securing Communication between a Web Service and a Client

Overview

Across the Internet, websites make extensive use of secure links to exchange sensitive information, such as credit-card data. To create a secure link, websites take advantage of the secure sockets layer (SSL) to encrypt the data that the client and server exchange. Within an HTML file or active server page, creating a secure link to a remote server is as easy as changing the http:// prefix within a URL to https://.

In this chapter, you will learn the changes that you must make within a web service to secure the communication that occurs between a client program and the service. First, this chapter will examine the secure sockets layer and the public-key infrastructure (PKI). Then, you will learn how to enable SSL support within your server. Finally, you will learn how to take advantage of SSL-based encryption within your web services.

In Chapter 8, “Authenticating Users within Web Services,” you learned how to use authentication to verify that a user is truly the person he or she claims to be. To fully secure your web services, you should combine a secure link with authentication. Then, you must determine ways to secure the data that resides on the server itself.