Cross-network WCF service authentication - What's the best way to do it?

Question

Hi! I have a WCF service that's hosted at a commerical hosting facility that I need to authenticate against Active Directory on my corporate network.

I should mention that there is no way to setup an AD-Trust between the two networks. Also, my corproate IT department sucks so any solution will likely need to be crafted and/or implemented by me. In the worse case scenario I can host a custom authentication service on my corporate servers that the hosted WCF service would call to do authentication but I'd prefer to use a pre-built or (at the very least!) industry standard way of accomplishing my requirements.

Any help in this regard would be greatly appreciated....

Answer 1

I don't think this will work out of the box - you'll have to write some code.

The issues are:

1. Get a connection from the hosting machine to something on your network
2. Get the something on your network to talk to Active Directory

I don't know enough about WCF to supply details, but I know that it's possible to completely customize authentication. You would need to have your custom authentication communicate to a service on your network (probably using WCF and some very secury configuration). This service would take the username/password from the hosting provider and pass it to Active Directory to validate.