Probably no advantage, given the architecture you're describing.  You're
describing transport-level encryption and identification, WS-Security
provides the same but at the message-level, the infrastructure of which can
provide more flexibility for future needs--e.g., I can encrypt a SOAP
request to withdraw funds from my bank account with the public key of the
bank, send it to your third party web service which can't read the message
but can still forward it off to the bank, which *can* read the message. 
Transport-level encryption alone would allow your third-party web service to
read and understand the entire message--including sensitive bank account
information.

Glen


Rajeev jha wrote:
> 
> Hi
> Please excuse my ignorance. I am trying to understand why would you use
> ws-security with certificates when you can do the  client certificates
> authentication  at the apache /web server level? 
> 
> So assuming that the web services are published from a web server
> (stand-alone tomcat or Apache proxying to tomcat) and you can use the web
> server itself to verify the clients, why use WS-security? what is the
> advantage? 
> 
> Thanks 
> 
> -rajeev.
> 

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