A formal approach for securing XML document

With the ever increasing demand for the Web-based applications over the Internet, the related security issue has become a great concern. Web document security has been studied by many researchers and various security mechanisms have been proposed. The aim of this article is to investigate the security issue of the XML documents. We discuss a protection mechanism and investigate a formal approach to ensure the security of Web-based XML documents. Our approach starts by introducing a high level language to specify an XML document and its protection authorizations. We also discuss and investigate the syntax and semantics of the language. The flexible and powerful access control specification can effectively protect the documents from unauthorized attempts.