Hey there,

Something I can't wrap my head around is how secure web services are.

For example we're writing a desktop application that will interact with data on one of our websites as well as local data. This data is sensitive though and the last thing we want is anybody calling the web services.

I've not yet found anything that says web services has some kind of authentication methods and the only security I've seen people talk about is using certificates to encrypt the message.

I'm no guru on this and would appreciate anyone's input and perhaps a link to somewhere that will explain this in simple terms.

Thanks Jacques