Encrypting SOAP MessagesXML Web Services are being hailed by the industry as the enabler for freeing information from the confines of HTML. Using SOAP, a protocol submitted to the W3C, data can be encoded in XML and transmitted using any number of Internet protocols, HTTP being the most common. So long as both the sender and the receiver can agree upon the message format—that is, the protocol that SOAP defines—information can easily be exchanged in a platform-independent manner.