The Web's leading standards group proposed two recommendations for encrypting XML data and documents, a key development in the organization's push to standardize technologies crucial to Web services. . .
The Web's leading standards group proposed two recommendations for encrypting XML data and documents, a key development in the organization's push to standardize technologies crucial to Web services.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released proposed recommendations for XML Encryption Syntax and Processing and Decryption Transform for XML Signature. Together, the protocols will let Web sites and services send and receive sensitive data confidentially.

While methods already exist for encrypting XML documents, the W3C's proposed recommendations will make it possible to encrypt selected sections or elements of a document--for instance, a credit card number entered in an XML form.

The Decryption Transform recommendation provides a way of determining what parts of a document were encrypted or decrypted at the time a party signed it. The proposed recommendation is crucial to letting different parties authenticate discrete sections of a document at different times.