Find out where a request to a WCF program is coming from?

Question

I'm making a very simple WCF (C#, .NET 4.0) licensing program that automatically emails a user a key they can use to activate the software they just bought.

My idea is my website would call a function provided by my service which would generate a key and then send the key the email provided. Later my software would also call that service and use that key to register/activate the product. The function I has in mind looks something like:

void (String email, String ProductID)

Obviously I'd like to have some degree of authentication with that function - only my website should be able to ask the service to generate a key (and hopefully that happens after they've purchased the software.) Could I use the same method to provide the same functionality based on Paypal IPN (I've never used it, but I've read you can have paypal IPN send you a ping once a user has paid for something)?

Please keep in mind I'm not trying to create a super secure system, I'm just trying to explore the concepts of licensing systems by building a working system. I was inspired by this post earlier today and making something similar seemed like a great way for me to finally learn WCF (I'm one of those people who can only really learn something by diving in.)

Thanks for your insights!

Answer 1

You can filter the requests in the config file using the

<behavior> 
<IPFilter .. />
</behavior>

as described in the following post.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/722008/can-i-setup-an-ip-filter-for-a-wcf-service

If you want to do it with in the function, you can check the IP address as shown in the below link:

http://nayyeri.net/detect-client-ip-in-wcf-3-5