# What is WSS4J?

WSS4J is part of the Apache Web Services project. Here is link the to all Apache Web Service projects.

Apache WSS4J is an implementation of the OASIS Web Services Security specifications (WS-Security, WSS) from OASIS Web Services Security TC. WSS4J is primarily a Java library that can be used to sign, verify, encrypt, and decrypt SOAP Messages according to the WS-Security specifications. WSS4J uses Apache Axis and other Apache XML-Security projects and is interoperable with other JAX-RPC based server/clients and .Net WSE server/clients that follow the OASIS WSS specifications.

## Supported WSS Specifications

WSS4J implements

- OASIS Web Serives Security: SOAP Message Security 1.0 Standard 200401, March 2004

- Username Token profile V1.0

- X.509 Token Profile V1.0

The Web Services Security part of WSS4J is fairly well tested and many WebService projects use it already. Also interoperability with various other implementations is well tested.

## Support of older WSS specifications

The WSS4J release 1.1.0 is the last release that was able to emulate previous WSS specs.

This and next WSS4J releases (>= 1.5.x)

- support the OASIS V1.0 specs and the relevant namespaces only

- support one versions of provisional (draft) namespaces for the upcoming version

After the next version of the WSS specs is finished, we do one WSS4J release with the provisional namespaces and another release (with a new release number) with the then fixed namespace URIs. Doing so we could save a lot of coding while retaining some backward compatibility using the n-1 release.

## Web Services Security Features

WSS4J can generate and process the following SOAP Bindings:

- XML Security

- XML Signature

- XML Encryption

- Tokens

- Username Tokens

- Timestamps

- SAML Tokens

WSS4J supports X.509 binary certificates and certificate paths. Here is the link to WSS4J. There is also a Wiki concering Apache WS projects and WSS4J as one of the WS sub-projects:

http://wiki.apache.org/ws/

http://wiki.apache.org/ws/FrontPage/WsFx

### WS-Trust and WS-Secure Conversation specifications

WSS4J now comes with the support for derived key token signature and encryption. This is used by the Axis2-"rahas" module to provide the WS-Secure Conversation.

WS-Trust support is also being developed within Axis2 based on WSS4J

org.apache.ws.sandbox. package contains experimental implementations of these specifications.

## Installation (binary distribution)

The WSS4J zip archive is the binary distribution and contains the wss4j jar file, some examples, test classes (incl. sources), the interop test classes (incl. sources and necessary certificate store), and the according client and server deployment and protery files.

The WSS4J jar file contains all classes that implement the basic functions and the handlers. To install it make sure this jar file is in the classpath of your Axis client and/or Axis server.

In addition you need to set up the property files that contain information about the certificate keystores you use. The property files and the keystore are accessed either as resources via classpath or, if that fails, as files using the relative path of the application

Thus no specific installation is required. The wss4j-1.5.2.jar file should be included into ear or war files of enterprise or web application servers.

Please refer to the JAVADOC files of the distribution for further information how to use WSS4J, the handlers, and how to setup the deployment files.

## Required software

To work with WSS4J you need additional software. Most of the software is also needed by your SOAP base system, e.g. Apache Axis.

To simplify installation and operation of WSS4J an additional ZIP file is provided that holds all other JARs that are required by WSS4J. Please note that we probably not use the very latest versions of these JARs, but we used them during the tests.

NOTE: If you use another XML parser than what is defined below (Xerces) make sure that your parser fully supports namespaces. The Crimson parser included in the Sun JDK 1.4.x does not support namespaces or has a buggy implementation.

To implement the Web Service Security (WSS) part specific software is required:

addressing-1.0.jar

This jar contains the implementation of WS-Adressing, required by WSS4J Trust (in sandbox).

See: http://ws.apache.org/addressing/

axis-1.4.jar
axis-ant-1.4.jar
axis-jaxrpc-1.4.jar
axis-saaj-1.4.jar

These jars contain the Apache Axis base software. They implement the basic SOAP processing, deployment, WSDL to Java, Java to WSDL tools and a lot more. Plase refer to a Axis documentation how to setup Axis. You should be familiar with Axis, its setup, and deployment methods before you start with any WSS4J functions.

See: http://ws.apache.org/axis/

bcprov-jdk13-132.jar

This is the BouncyCastle library that implements all necessary encryption, hashing, certifcate, and keystore functions. Without this fanatstic library WSS4J wouldn't work at all.

See: http://www.bouncycastle.org/

commons-codec-1.3.jar
commons-discovery-0.2.jar
commons-httpclient-3.0-rc2.jar
commons-logging-1.0.4.jar

These jars are from the Commons project and provide may useful funtions, such as Base64 encoding/decoding, resource lookup, and much more. Please refer to the commons project to get more information.

The main link for the commons project: http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/index.html

junit-3.8.1.jar

The famous unit test library. Required if you like to build WSS4J from source and run the unit tests.

See: http://www.junit.org/

log4j-1.2.9.jar

The logging library. Required to control the logging, error reporting and so on.

See: http://logging.apache.org/

opensaml-1.0.1.jar

The SAML implemetation used by WSS4J to implement the SAML profile.

See: http://www.opensaml.org/

wsdl4j-1.5.1.jar

The WSDL parsing functions, required by Axis tools to read and parse WSDL.

See: http://ws.apache.org/axis/ under related projects

xalan-2.7.0.jar

Library that implements XML Path Language (XPath) and XSLT. The XML Security implementation needs several functions of Xalan XPath.

See: http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/

xmlsec-1.4.0.jar

This library implements the XML-Signature Syntax and Processing and the XML Encryption Syntax and Processing specifications of the W3C. Thus they form one of the base foundations of WSS4J.

See: http://xml.apache.org/security/

xercesImpl.jar
xml-apis.jar

The XML parser implementation. Required by anybody :-) .

See: http://xml.apache.org/xerces2-j/