I am pretty new to security aspect of application. I have a C++ window service (server) that listens to a particular port for http requests. The http requests can be made via ajax or C# client. Due to some scope change now we have to secure this communication between the clients and custom server written in C++.
Therefore i am looking for options to secure this communication. Can someone help me out with the possible approaches i can take to achieve this.
Thanks
Dpak
Given that you have an existing HTTP server (non-IIS) and you want to implement HTTPS (which is easy to screw up and hard to get right), you have a couple of options:
Rewrite your server as a COM object, and then put together an IIS webservice that calls your COM object to implement the webservice. With this done, you can then configure IIS to provide your webservice via HTTP and HTTPS.
Install a proxy server (Internet Security and Acceleration Server or Apache with mod_proxy) on the same host as your existing server and setup the proxy server to listen via HTTPS and then reverse proxy the requests to your service.
The second option requires little to no changes to your application; the first option is the better long-term architectural move.