In this paper, we present a survey of the state of the art in XML XML security. This survey will support the future research and development work as well as to raise the awareness for the presented approaches. In this survey, we present the different articles that describe the XML security standards specifically XML encryption, XML signature, and XACML, and we introduce the different approaches for access control for XML documents. This survey will support the future research and development work as well as to raise the awareness for the presented approaches. © 2013 IEEE.