Using Other Security Credentials

The WS-Security specification is open enough to allow you to use any form of security for securing messages that you send. The specification categorizes the credentials you supply as username and password credentials or binary credentials. As you’ve seen, the current release of WSE supports the use of username and password credentials as well as X509 certificates but it also allows you to use any security credentials you want.

We won’t look at custom security credentials in any detail in this chapter because this is a topic for only the most advanced users. We’ll briefly discuss how to define your own custom security credentials when we look at using shared secrets for encrypting messages, but for most purposes X509 certificates will meet all of your security needs, so we’ll mainly focus on them.