Java™ Web Services Unleashed

Encryption in XML

One problem with using encryption with XML is that XML was designed to be more of a human-readable format, and encrypted data is anything but readable. Any encrypted data appears as a big block of random text.

When it comes to digital signatures, things are even worse. Remember that changing even a single bit in the original data causes the secure hash to change. When you send an XML file from one system to another, or run it through a parser first, you may find that some subtle changes have taken place. For example, some systems use the newline character as a line terminator, whereas others use a carriage return followed by newline. If the original signature is based on having only newlines at the end, but the recipient receives ...