J2EE™ Security for Servlets, EJBs and Web Services: Applying Theory and Standards to Practice

Chapter 7. Securing the Message

There exists an important class of application where the originator and the recipient of electronic information need not be active at the same time. An example is e-mail. An e-mail message may get stored at intermediate mail servers a number of times before being delivered to the ultimate recipient. The same holds for application-to-application communication where the messaging infrastructure might do store-and-forward delivery of messages. The security requirements of these applications cannot be met by transport level security, the kind offered by SSL protocol covered in Chapter 6, Securing The Wire. Recall that SSL relies on a handshake between the sender and the receiver, involving an exchange of messages ...