SOAP Firewalls Revisited

Jon Udell thinks that development of SOAP firewalls will be more difficult than it appears. The reason for this is that the message description in headers is optional. Therefore it is up to developers of SOAP-enabled application whether to include it or not. And which developer on his own would bother with a thing that has no direct effect on users? To resolve this, firewall administrators and application developers will need to learn to talk to each other.

Jon has also found several vendors offering products that can provide XML message routing, translation and SSL acceleration in one hardware box. Does this mean that XML traffic inspection will be a separate box similar to an email antivirus gateway rather than extension of existing firewall? This is indeed possible and it will , in the end, depend on the amount of XML traffic.

12:19:54 PM