WS-Policy is a specification that allows

web services A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

to use XML to advertise their policies (on

security Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercion). Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems, or any other entity or ...

quality of service Quality of service (QoS) is the description or measurement of the overall performance of a service, such as a telephony or computer network, or a cloud computing service, particularly the performance seen by the users of the network. To quantitat ...

, etc.) and for web service consumers to specify their policy requirements. WS-Policy is a

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...

recommendation as of September 2007. WS-Policy represents a set of specifications that describe the capabilities and constraints of the security (and other business) policies on intermediaries and end points (for example, required security tokens, supported encryption algorithms, and privacy rules) and how to associate policies with services and end points.

Policy Assertion

Assertions can either be requirements put upon a web service or an advertisement for the policies of a web service.

Operator tags

Two "operators" (XML tags) are used to make statements about policy combinations: *''wsp:ExactlyOne'' - asserts that only one child node must be satisfied. *''wsp:All'' - asserts that all child nodes must be satisfied. Logically, an empty ''wsp:All'' tag makes no assertions.

Policy Intersection

If both provider and consumer specify a policy, an effective policy will be computed, which usually consists of the intersection of both policies. The new policy contains those assertions made by both sides which do not contradict each other. However, synonymous assertions are considered incompatible by a policy intersection. This can easily be explained by the fact that policy intersection is a syntactic approach, which does not incorporate the semantics of the assertions. Furthermore, it ignores the assertion parameters. Opposed to what the name might suggest, a policy intersection is (although quite similar) not a set-intersection.

Associated specifications

WS-Policy - Attachment
specifies how to add policies to WSDL and UDDI. *

WS-SecurityPolicy WS-Security Policy is a web services specification, created by IBM and 12 co-authors, that has become an OASIS In ecology, an oasis (; : oases ) is a fertile area of a desert or semi-desert environment WS-Security Web Services Security (WS-Security, WSS) is an extension to SOAP to apply security to Web services. It is a member of the Web service specifications and was published by OASIS. The protocol specifies how integrity and confidentiality can be enf ...

WS-Trust WS-Trust is a WS-* specification and OASIS standard that provides extensions to WS-Security, specifically dealing with the issuing, renewing, and validating of security tokens, as well as with ways to establish, assess the presence of, and broker ...

and WS-SecureConversation. * WS-Policy4MASC specifies management policies for Web services and their compositions.

Policy Policy is a deliberate system of guidelines to guide decisions and achieve rational outcomes. A policy is a statement of intent and is implemented as a procedure or protocol. Policies are generally adopted by a governance body within an or ...

XML-based standards Policy

Policy Assertion

Operator tags

Policy Intersection

Associated specifications

External links