Building a Secure Service for Document Format Translation

Targeting the creation of a centralized web service to translate the document format, an XML based translation method is proposed to protect the private or sensitive data in the document being translated. It includes three steps: a) to replace the sensitive data by a set of identifiers or XPath expressions in the original document; b) to perform the format translation; c) to restore the sensitive data in the result document using the identifiers or XPath expressions. Employing this method, sensitive content of the document never circulates over the network, thus security can be ensured; also it can help to reduce the network traffic so that the translation service can work smoothly. A format translation system based on the above method is implemented and has achieved successful results.