It's been a week already and I'm still not fully comfortable with implementing ASP.NET Membership Provider with WCF. I'm wondering:
We already have a website which is running under HTTPS protocol. We are working on a new application which will have a WCF service and is going to replace our old application (with HTTPS). Now my question is, since we already have a secured website, do I have to get another certificate just for the WCF service?
If yes, then do I have to get certificates for clients as well? (As I was looking on the web, most of the answers I found were "yes".)
If no, can I use the existing certificate to authenticate my service?
To answer your 2nd question, you only need client certificates if you want your WCF service to support mutual (2-way) SSL authentication, in which both the server and client sides are authenticated by their respective certificates.
Refer to this question for further information on mutual ssl and wcf.
how to implement 2-way SSL certificate for WCF
You have to have 1 SSL Certificate per domain unless you purchase a wildcard certificate. So, if your current SSL Certificate is for subdomain.mydomain.com and you want to host the WCF service at anothersubdomain.mydomain.com (or even www.anotherdomain.com), then you'll need another certificate. If this is something that would happen fairly frequently, then I'd suggest you purchase a *.mydomain.com SSL certificate.
Another option would be to host the WCF service under the current subdomain with a URL like subdomain.mydomain.com\myservice\service.svc.
I can't answer your second question but I doubt you are using client side certificates.
Here's a link to a Beginner's guide on SSL Certificates.
Related
I have a c# .net wcf web service on a windows server with iis. I need to know if there is a way to tell the web service that it can accept request only from specific URL.
example:
ApplicationA call ApplicationAwebService = should work
ApplicationB call ApplicationAwebService = should be denied
Right now, they are all on the same server, but I need a solution that works even if they are on a different server (3tier applications).
thanks
If you are using WCF then its possible to use mutual authentication between services and clients. Mutual authentication achieves not only security for the server to accept connections from legit clients but provides the ability for the clients to verify that they are talking to a legit server.
Mutual authentication can be achieved through Message security (Encrypting the data sent between the client and server and vice versa) by using certificates, kerberos (Windows auth), tokens and a username/password configuration.
Mutual authentication can also be achieved in WCF through rolebased authentication, identities, and resource based authentication
Reference from msdn: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647503.aspx
Just have a quick a question regarding best practices.
I am connecting to a 3rd party api via soap over HTTPS.
To do this I have simply added a service reference to my application by entering the 3rd party wsdl address.
In my C# application I have simply instantiated the service passed in my api key and can successfully retrieve data.
I am aware that this would of failed if the servers ssl certificate didn't meet the following requirements.
the URL in the certificate matches the URL I'm posting to
the certificate is valid and trusted
the certificate has not expired
However, is this secure enough? Is it possible for the ssl certificate to be hijacked or faked? Do I need to store a copy of the valid certificate locally and check the server certificate against the local copy?
Thanks
Ant
I'm planning on deploying a WCF service to multiple devices to receive notifications of certain events. All of the events will originate from a client machine that can provide a certificate to the service to authenticate.
I'm less concerned about the client authenticating each service, but I'm having difficulty choosing the proper WCF security settings to provide this setup. It appears that message-level security requires a client certificate and a service certificate.
But the devices hosting the service will not be able to be maintained in a way that allows us to update the service certificate periodically when it expires. So here are my questions:
Is there a way to set up a WCF service for client certificate authentication without a service certificate on the server?
Is there a simpler approach for verifying the identity of the caller that I'm missing?
I apologize for the brevity of this answer, but it is better to think of it as a Server certificate, rather than a Service certificate. Multiple services could use the same certificate, and you can work around the expiration by not checking for expiration client side. In terms of is there any easier way, WCF supports a variety of authentication and authorization models, here's some useful links.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee748498.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733131(v=vs.110).aspx
Here is a scenario:
Desktop application
Installed from the web
Needs to call a WCF webservice
Transferred data needs to be encrypted from Client to Server and Server to Client
Is there a well understood solution for this that is:
Secure
Easy to manage and deploy
I guess what this comes down to firstly is whether https encryption happens in both directions... Does it? Or do you need mutual authentication for that?
Try using HTTP over SSL
HTTPS is what you're after - it does provide end-to-end encryption (client-to-server and server-to-client).
So long as you can generate and install a server certificate, and be sure that your clients 'trust' the issuing authority of your certificate, then you're good to go. Note that this is not mutual authentication - your clients know that they have contacted the correct server, but the server does not know who has contacted it.
It can offer mutual authentication through the use of client-side certificates, but I would argue that does not fall under the 'easy to deploy' requirement.
HTTPS works...
I was confusing Encryption with Authentication and they are two different things. Simple Https which is the most common only authenticates the server to the client which is sufficient in many cases. An additional step (where the client also has a certificate) can be required to authenticate the client to the server but this is not required. In both scenarios, data with Https is encrypted from both the server to the client and client to the server using a session key once the SSL handshake has been completed. This is all described here:
Description of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Handshake
I'd like to use client certificates to verify the identity of administrative callers to my web service. Then I can issue certificates only to the people I want to call my web service and be pretty sure noone else can call it. This is in a very controlled scenario where only one or two people will get the client certificate, so distribution isn't a hard problem.
This article provides a good example of how to call a web service using a client certificate.
But how can I check details of the client certificate from within my web service? This old article talks about configuring IIS to do it, but I'd like to do it programmatically within my app. I think?
thanks for any suggestions!
The incoming Request has a ClientCertificates collection that you can interrogate -- you can check the various fields in the cert or check the actual raw byte data (perhaps against a datastore or other source) if you want to completely validate it.
Note, if you issue the certs from your own private CA, you will need to install the CA's cert on your webserver into a store that is visible to all users, otherwise IIS won't request those certs from the user (due to the nature of how the server/client interaction works.)