Using HTTPS with BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service)

Question

Hi all,

I am writing a client application that needs to send a file via BITS to my server. I have everything working for the most part, but I can't get the BITS connection to operate securely with HTTPS.

Right now I'm just using basic authentication through HTTP, so the login is being sent cleartext--which is not optimal :-) I would like to be able to use HTTPS, but am not sure how to go about doing this. According to this Google Groups thread, BITS "doesn't support authentication using certificates" (though that comment is a few years old now). Does this mean SSL is out? How else can I secure a connection for BITS via HTTPS?

My server is running IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

BITS supports HTTP and HTTPS protocols. So if you have an SSL cert installed on your server and also installed in the Trusted Store on you client then I believe that BITS will work over HTTPS without any more intervention.