WCF Certificate Authentication without installing on the Client

Question

Hi All,

Our setup includes a WCF service and a number of clients written by us. Some of the clients include Silverlight applications, whereas others include Web and Windows applications.

I (think) I would like to authenticate clients based on X.509 certificates. Typically you would install a private key on the client to encrypt (aka digitaly sign) the messages. The server can the use the clients public key to de-crypt it to ensure the message has not been changed and prove the message is from who we expect (aka authenticated).

I dont want to install a certificate on a client machine. Its a hassel to deploy, and we cant really ask our clients to do it. I was speaking to someone the other day who sugested embeding the cert in a client assembly, reading it and using that. Is that possible?

It would be great if someone could point me to an example.

Thanks in advance,

David

Answer 1

We have the same issue. It's a hassle and a lot of work to install certificates on numerous clients. Looking forward to see a good description on how this could be done..

t.

Answer 2

Here is a suggestion. Could also be tweaked to use an embedded certificate.

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WCF/wcfcertificates.aspx