Question

I have a WCF service to which access is only granted to a few machines that have a known certificate, and to a web app.

For the web app, I need to specify the certificate to use for authorization:

<behaviors>
  <endpointBehaviors>
    <behavior name="ScannerManagerBehavior">
      <clientCredentials>
        <clientCertificate findValue="MyCertificateName" x509FindType="FindBySubjectName" storeLocation="CurrentUser" storeName="My"/>
        <serviceCertificate>
          <authentication certificateValidationMode="PeerTrust"/>
        </serviceCertificate>
      </clientCredentials>
    </behavior>
  </endpointBehaviors>
</behaviors>

The problem is that the web app isn’t running under the user account for which the certificate is registered. To get round it in dev mode I changed the app pool to run under my user identity, but that’s a temp. solution.

Should I install the certificate for the “Network Service” user account (if you can do that), specify a different source for the certificate, or is there a better way to solve this problem?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Install the certificate in the LocalMachine store rather than the current user store – you can then pick it up from there by changing the storeLocation in the clientCertificate element