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XML within the enterprise: benefits, opportunities ... and risk. (Security).

Article Excerpt
One of XML's quieter (or at least less-hyped) success stories is its use as a tool for enterprise application integration (EAI). XML markup is being used as a common data format, and XML-based Web services are achieving success as a "protocol stack" for existing applications to integrate.

Unified EAI can provide significant cost savings that reach directly to the bottom line. One of the most notable and public examples is a leading financial services company that was able to remove 10% of their back-end servers once they moved to an all-XML messaging structure.

While this can bring economic benefits and enable new business opportunities, there are a number of risks associated with XML. As XML applications increase direct access and remote procedure calls to back-end systems, mission-critical data, and information stores--first to select partners, perhaps over a VPN, and then to a general audience over the Internet--the risks of XML become more worrisome.

We can divide these risks into two general classes: the risk of malformed XML and the risk of insecure XML.

Malformed XML

XML supports a number of different encodings of the Unicode character set. An XML document can start with a Byte Order Mark (BOM) to indicate the encoding used (see Appendix F of the XML Specification, www.w3.org/TR/ REC-xml). Currently, the most common encoding is UTF-8, which isn't a BOM,...

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