WSEmail: A Retrospective on a System for Secure Internet Messaging Based on Web Services Michael J. May Kevin D. Lux Kinneret Academic College University of Pennsylvania, Rowan University
[email protected] [email protected] Carl A. Gunter University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
[email protected] Abstract 1 Introduction Web services are a mature technology nearing their Web services offer an opportunity to redesign a va- twentieth birthday. They have created the founda- riety of older systems to exploit the advantages of a tion for highly interoperable distributed systems to flexible, extensible, secure set of standards. In this communicate over the Internet using standardized work we revisit WSEmail, a system proposed over protocols (e.g. SOAP, JSON) and security mech- ten years ago to improve email by redesigning it as anisms (e.g. OAuth (IETF RFC 6749), XMLD- a family of web services. WSEmail offers an alterna- SIG [5]). Legacy systems and protocols must be tive vision of how instant messaging and email ser- reevaluated to see how they can benefit from mod- vices could have evolved, offering security, extensi- ern architectures, standards, and tools. As a case bility, and openness in a distributed environment in- study of such an analysis and redesign, we present stead of the hardened walled gardens that today's an expanded study of WSEmail [20], electronic mail rich messaging systems have become. WSEmail's ar- redesigned as a family of web services we first imple- chitecture, especially its automatic plug-in download mented and presented in 2005. feature allows for rich extensions without changing the base protocol or libraries.