I have a silverlight application over WCF. Initially, I am only configure it over http protocol with custom binding. Now, consider different users might have different requirements which will need to use it over https protocol.
I have try to configure two different endpoint with different binding(one use httpTransport, the other one use httpsTransport), but when I run the application in debug mode, it seems like localhost still hosting over https schema(I've somehow managed the localhost to run it in SSL mode, but don't know how to switch it back)
Does anyone has any idea how can I get this work?
I don't do much client side web programming, so I'm trying to grasp this concept in how it relates to my specific situation.
I have a RESTful WCF service running on a port in the 50000s. Additionally, I have a bunch of web forms (not ASP WebForms) written in HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript that make AJAX calls to this WCF service. The web forms are hosted on the same host, but are using port 80. The AJAX calls made by the web forms are all GET only requests.
Additionally, I have a third-party cloud-hosted application that's in a completely different location (different host), which needs to call the WCF service as well. This communication is performing POSTs & PUTs to the WCF service.
Obviously the calls being made from the third-party hosted cloud application is cross origin. From my research it appears that the different ports are in fact different origins.
I know that security & CORS are different concepts, but here is what I'm trying to accomplish and I need to better understand how all of this works:
Right now I allow all cross-origin requests, and everything is working, but I'd like to limit it down to improve security and then eventually set up HTTPS with transport security with both the webforms & WCF service using the same certificate. The third-party cloud service hosted-app would still need to be able to communicate with the WCF service so I would need to allow it to authenticate differently, so that would be done with a secret-key being passed since everything is server-side only.
This whole communication 'triangle' feels murky to me, and I hope that SO is the right place for me to be posting this question since it isn't directly code related.
Is the WCF - web forms situation described above considered cross-origin?
A) If the above is not cross-origin, would I then only need to pass the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: 'https://my-cloud-host' in my web.config?
B) If it is I understand that just need to echo back the allowed origins(s) in the header. What do I set (if anything) for Access-Control-Allow-Origin in IIS in this case? What do I echo if it's not allowed, just the original origin?
Would my idea to use the same certificate for mutual SSL Authentication work if they are hosted on different ports? Would this prevent the cloud-service from communicating with the WCF service, or would having a second endpoint allow for this?
Am I losing my mind? I'm so confused by this whole thing.
Yes. In all major browsers except for IE, a different port IS considered to be another origin.
A) is correct. You need only to allow your port-80 origin to send requests.
I'm not sure about that. I tend to beleive that SSL is port-awared, and you can't use the same certificate on different ports.
You can read this excellent article to give your mind some rest.
I have a WCF service which i host as a Windows Service. I need to support both Windows and NTLM authentication on the service endpoint.
I came across a MSDN page which explains exactly the same with .NET 4.5, here's the link:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh556235(v=vs.110).aspx
Going by this, I configured my service endpoint in code as explained in the self-hosted services section of the above link. But, when I test this doesn't work. I captured the traffic and observed that there's no HTTP 401 challenge sent by the service, instead, it directly fails with HTTP 400 Bad Request error. I believe that should have been a HTTP 401 challenge sent to client.
Did I miss anything here?
Well it is possible and I could make it work after 4 days of struggle, the errors HTTP Bad Request does not indicate the problem. But, As I added service metadata behavior with HttpGetEnabled it worked.
Also, ensure if you define ServiceAuthenticationBehavior you do mark the ClientCredentialType to InheritedFromHost. This would ensure the authentication schemes as indicated by the ServiceAuthenticationBahavior are applied.
Hope, this would save someone else's 4 days! :)
You can have multiple authentication schemes running within the same Windows service, but not at the same end point - that's not possible.
For instance, I can create and IIS or self-host a web service called NeedHelp that uses three kinds of authentication, and here are my endpoints:
http:/ /NeedHelp:8001/NoAuth
http:/ /NeedHelp:8002/WindowsAuth
http:/ /NeedHelp:8003/CertAuth
All of those can run under the same web service, all hosted by IIS or self hosted as a Windows service. But they all need separate port addresses.
Is there any way I can accomplish the following:
Single Web.config file for a .net web application.
the web application exposes a number of WCF services for consumption by javascript.
Production requires ssl, so all these services are forced over ssl.
Development does not allow ssl, (ASP.NET development server)
How can I configure this so that production will utilize an HTTPS endpoint, and development will utilize an HTTP endpoint for the same service?
Adding two endpoints to the same service doesn't work, because when it tries to connect to the HTTP endpoint it throws an error since the asp.net development server doesn't support the https endpoint.
I solved this by using a ServiceHostFactory to generate the appropriate bindings for me.
It was a little awkward at first, having less control, but works out better in the end.
this is the line that was key, I put it in my .svc file:
Factory="System.ServiceModel.Activation.WebScriptServiceHostFactory"
I'm not certain that this is the best solution to your problem, but one way of doing this would be to declare in the config file a variable to indicate what environment this is running in (dev or prod). If you configure two endpoints, you could say in your hosting code,
if environment=="dev", then host the service on endpoint A.
if environment=="eval", then host the service on endpoint B.
Disclaimer: I've tried Googling for something that will do what I want, but no luck there. I'm hoping someone here might be able to lend a hand.
Background
I have a .NET class library that accesses a secure web service with the WSE 2.0 library. The web service provides a front-end to a central database (it's actually part of a data-sharing network spanning multiple customers) and the class library provides a simple wrapper around the web service calls to make it accessible from a legacy VB6 application. The legacy application uses the class library to retrieve and publish information to the web service. Currently, the application and class library DLL are both installed client-side on multiple workstations.
The Problem
The catch is that the web service we are accessing uses HTTPS and a valid X509 client certificate needs to be presented to the web service in order to access it. Since all of our components live on the client machine, this has led to deployment problems. For example, we have to download and install per-user certificates on each client machine, one for each user who might need to access the web service through our application. What's more, the web server itself must be accessed through a VPN (OpenVPN in particular), which means a VPN client has to be installed and configured on every client machine. It is a major pain (some of our customers have dozens of workstations).
The Proposed Solution
The proposed solution is to move all of this logic to a central server on the customer site. In this scenario, our legacy application would communicate with a local server, which will then go off and forward requests to the real web service. In addition, all of the X509 certificates would be installed on the server, instead of on each individual client computer, as part of the effort to simplify and centralize deployment.
So far, we've come up with three options:
Find a ready-made SOAP proxy server which can take incoming HTTP-based SOAP requests, modify the Host header and routing-related parts of the SOAP message (so they are pointing to the real web server), open an SSL connection to the real web server, present the correct client certificate to the server (based on a username-to-certificate mapping), forward the modified request, read the response, convert it back to plaintext, and send it back to the client.
Write a proxy server by hand that does everything I just mentioned.
Think of completely different and hopefully better way to solve this problem.
Rationale
The rationale for trying to find and/or write a SOAP proxy server is that our existing .NET wrapper library wouldn't have to be modified at all. We would simply point it at the proxy server instead of the real web service endpoint, using a plain HTTP connection instead of HTTPS. The proxy server will handle the request, modify it to so that the real web service will accept it (i.e. things like changing the SOAPAction header so that it is correct), handle the SSL/certificate handshake, and send the raw response data back to the client.
However, this sounds like an awful hack to me me at best. So, what our my options here?
Do I bite the bullet and write my own HTTP/SSL/SOAP/X509 aware proxy server to do all this?
Or...is there a ready-made solution with an extensible enough API that I can easily make it do what I want
Or...should I take a completely different approach?
The key issues we are trying to solve are (a) centralizing where certificates are stored to simplify installation and management of certificates and (b) setting things up so that the VPN connection to the web server only occurs from a single machine, instead of needing every client to have VPN client software installed.
Note we do not control the web server that is hosting the web service.
EDIT: To clarify, I have already implemented a (rather crappy) proxy server in C# that does meet the requirements, but something feels fundamentally wrong to me about this whole approach to the problem. So, ultimately, I am looking either for reassurance that I am on the right track, or helpful advice telling me I'm going about this the completely wrong way, and any tips for doing it a better way (if there is one, which I suspect there is).
Apache Camel would fit the bill perfectly. Camel is a lightweight framework for doing exactly this kind of application integration. I've used it to do some similar http proxying in the past.
Camel uses a very expressive DSL for defining routes between endpoint. In your case you want to stand up a server that is visible to all the client machines at your customer site and whatever requests it receives you want to route 'from' this endpoint 'to' your secure endpoint via https.
You'll need to create a simple class that defines the route. It should extend RouteBuilder and override the configure method
public class WebServiceProxy extends RouteBuilder
{
public void configure()
{
from("jetty:http://0.0.0.0:8080/myServicePath")
.to("https://mysecureserver/myServicePath");
}
}
Add this to a Camel context and you'll be good to go.
CamelContext context = new DefaultCamelContext();
context.addRoute(new WebServiceProxy());
context.start();
This route will create a webserver using jetty bound to 8080 on all local interfaces. Any requests sent to /myServicePath will get routed directly to your webservice defined by the uri https://mysecureserver/myServicePath. You define the endpoints using simple uris and the dsl and camel takes care of the heavy lifting.
You may need to configure a keystore with your certs in in and make it available to the http component. Post again if you've trouble here ;)
I'd read the camel docs for the http component for more details, check the unit tests for the project too as they are chock full of examples and best practices.
HTH.
FYI: To have the http component use your keystore, you'll need to set the following properties
System.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStore", "path/to/keystore");
System.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStorePassword", "keystore-password");
You should look into WCF, which supports the WS-Addressing protocol. I believe I've seen articles (in MSDN, I think) on writing routers using WCF.
You should also get rid of WSE 2.0 as soon as possible. It's very badly obsolete (having been replaced by WSE 3.0, which is also obsolete). All of its functions have been superceded by WCF.
I believe an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) could be a viable, robust solution to your problem. There is an open source ESB called Mule, which I've never used. I did mess around with ALSB (AquaLogic Service Bus) a while back, but it would be expensive for what you are describing. Anyway, the thing that you would want to look at in particular is the routing. I'm not sure it would be a simple plug 'n play, but it is indeed another option.
You can also do this with Microsoft ISA Server, a commercial Proxy/Cache server. It will do many of the things you need out of the box. For anything that is not possible out of the box, you can write an extension to the server to get it done.
ISA Server is not free.
ISA is now being renamed to "Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway".
It is much more than a web proxy server, though - it has support for many protocols and
lots of features. Maybe more than you need.
There is a service virtualization tool from Microsoft available on Codeplex called the Managed Service Engine which is intended to decouple the client from the web service implementation. It might fill the bill or give you a running start. I haven't really investigated it thoroughly, just skimmed an article in MSDN and your description reminded me of it.
http://www.codeplex.com/servicesengine
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd727511.aspx
Your security model doesn't make sense to me. What is the purpose of using HTTPS? Usually it is to authenticate the service to the clients. In that case, why does the server need to keep the clients' certificates? It is the clients who should be keeping the server's X509 Certificate.
Why do you need to go through VPN? If you need to authenticate clients, there are better ways to do that. You can either enable mutual authentication in SSL, or use XML-Security and possibly WS-Security to secure the service at the SOAP level. Even if you do use SSL to authenticate clients, you still shouldn't keep all the client certificates on the server, but rather use PKI and verify the client certificates to a trusted root.
Finally, specifically for your proposed proxy-based solution, I don't see why you need anything SOAP-specific. Don't you just need a web server that can forward any HTTP request to a remote HTTPS server? I don't know how to do this offhand, but I'd be investigating the likes of Apache and IIS...