According to Microsoft, ones of its primary purposes is to enable people to bypass existing security checks.

Now you say that there is no security problem here, we just need to get the servers and clients right. I say that anyone who thinks there is a snowball's chance in Hell of this really happening doesn't understand the realities of software development. If security is something people have to get right again and again, then mistakes will happen. Repeatedly. And people will turn out to (quite predictably) wind up making similar mistakes, making life quite convenient for crackers.

Yes. There is a specific gaping security hole in SOAP::Lite. That mistake is directly in the module, not the protocol. But that mistake should be regarded as a symptom of something that will happen.

Dominus draws a nice analogy to unsafe programming practices being like smoking in bed. Everything is fine as long as you don't fall asleep and drop the cigarette. And that is the problem with SOAP. Its complete regard for security is an unsafe programming practice. Everything will be fine as long as you make no mistakes. This is true, but it is still a piece of stupidity.

And continuing the analogy, using SOAP to tunnel to the Internet through a firewall for applications is like sprinkling gasoline on your bed before smoking. Again, everything will be fine if you do nothing wrong. Isn't that comforting?

I would like to avoid having software developed by developers who fail to understand this being used inside my network, thankyouverymuch...