If SSL is handled by a load balancer, do I still need to configure it in the WCF serviceCertificate node? My scenario is to use message level security. If someone can explain how load balancing with wcf and ssl works, that would be very nice.
WCF requires security tokens to be passed over a secure transport if the message itself is not signed/encrypted. Since traffic is HTTP between your Big-IP and your individual web servers, you need a way to have security tokens that you know are secured between the client and the Big-IP up front still be passed to your server farm. There's a couple ways to do that depending on what version of WCF you're using:
If you're using WCF 4.0 you can just create a custom binding and set the AllowInsecureTransport property on the built in SecurityBindingElement to signify that you don't care that the transport isn't secure.
If you're using WCF 3.5 you have to "lie" about security with a custom TransportSecurityBindingElement on the server side. You can read my old post about this here.
FWIW, they created a hotfix release for 3.5 SP1 that adds the AllowInsecureTransport to that version, but I don't know if your company will allow you to install custom hotfixes.
If you want to use message security then each message is encrypted and signed separately - there is no secure connection and load balancer behaves as with any other HTTP transport. Loadbalancer doesn't know about security and doesn't need certificate.
There are two gotchas:
All load balanced application servers hosting your WCF service must use the same certificate
You must ensure that your WCF binding doesn't use sessions (reliable, security) otherwise you will need load balancing algorithm with sticky sessions (all request for single session always routed to the same server)
It doesn't. Don't bother with this. You will be in a world of hurt. Just install the certs on each machine. We've recently been through this fiasco. WCF is not worth the effort it thinks it needs SSL but sees that it doesn't have it. Take a look at openrasta or something else if you want to do all your SSL on the loadbalancer. #microsoftfail
Related
I have a working WCF Service, that does what it should do, hosted by an IIS.
Now in another environment, this service shall be used as ever, but IIS should additionally require a client certificate for allowing to access.
So I generated some certificates, used iisClientCertificateMappingAuthentication to configure them and map them to users. So I can control which users can access the website and I see to what user the certificates are mapped in the FailedReqLogFiles.
Then I added a sub directory, put the WCF application in there, converted to an application with an apppool and ther the pain began.
The WCF Service is determined to demand that 'Anonymous authentication' must be activated. When I activate anonymous authenticaiton, the service can be invoked, but from then on, it doesn't matter which certificate is used for authentication.
I googled tons of articles and tried lots of configurations, but didn't success so far. I must admit, I'm not very familiar with WCF, this always drove me crazy. I do simply not understand why an application deals with the way the Webserver handles security (it's smiliar to adding SSL, when WCF is not configured properly, IIS shows 404, that's also one thing i do not understand, why the WCF is interfering with the way IIS exposes content to the world...).
Hope there's someone who could give advice, thank you very much in advance.
Regards, Chris
You could try below setting in iis to resolve the issue:
1)Open iis manager, select your site.
2)select the SSL setting from the middle pane.
3)in SSL setting check require SSL, client certificate select accept radio button.
4)click on apply and restart iis.
You could refer the below link for how to set iisclientcertificate authentication with WCF:
WCF Service Using Client Certificates Requires Anonymous Access in IIS and Therefore Doesn't Actually Work?
How do I implement Client Certificate authentication the right way?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/configuration/system.webServer/security/authentication/iisClientCertificateMappingAuthentication/
I have the following scenario:
A stateless service with a self-hosted OWIN WebApi. This provides a RESTful client-facing api.
A stateful service, again with a self-hosted OWIN WebApi.
After locating the correct stateful service partition, the stateless service calls into stateful service to access state. It does so via HTTP/HTTPS into the WebApi.
This configuration works fine running on the local cluster and an Azure cluster over HTTP. I'm running into problems though with HTTPS.
Using a self-signed cert I'm able to use HTTPS between the client and the stateless front-end service. However, I can't seem to get the configuration quite right to allow the stateless service to communicate with the stateful service over HTTPS.
I get an exception when the stateless service makes the request to the stateful service. "The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel." That has an inner exception of "The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure".
I'm a bit fuzzy on security on service fabric, but have read through several articles, SO posts, blogs, etc. on the subject.
Here are my questions:
At a high level, what is the proper way to secure interservice communication in my scenario?
Is a self-sign cert supported in this scenario?
Are the two services in the same cluster? If so, why not just call the stateful service from the stateless one using ServiceProxy?
You can use a self-signed certificate - the error you're seeing is not specific to Service Fabric. There are several ways to bypass it (although obviously it's not recommended to do that in production). Take a look at this SO question: C# Ignore certificate errors?
UPDATE 2: Solved the first problem (note below) - reduced the complexity/scope.
NOTE: If migrating from self-hosting WCF services in Cloud Services to Service Fabric using HttpsBinding then you need to change the HostNameComparisonMode from Exact to StrongWildcard.
I have scenario where I have to open many (100+) WCF Service Hosts to receive callbacks from an external service. They have same Contract but with differing credentials (service certificates are unique to each of our customers).
I would like to know if it is possible to route all requests through a single Host/Router that could check the connecting clients expected service certificate and either a) spoof/ignore (preferably) the service certificate or forward the connection onto the correct host.
I want to avoid having to load hundreds of service hosts with different credentials (which are stored in a database) when the service fabric node first comes up so I don't receive traffic to a service that's not loaded yet. Ideally I could load them when needed or not have to load them at all (spoofing certificate or something).
Looking for someone who is a lot savvier with WCF to shed some light on the possibilities. Thanks.
I am consuming WCF service in my VS 2005 solution by adding as webreference.
Ex: Today my WCF url address is - http://'ip-001':/service
If tomorrow i deployed my service in ip-002 machine, in this case i have to add again the service reference by using the http://'ip-002':/service
or
i have to change only config file.
Note: no service changes has made from ip-001 to ip-002.
Let me know without any service changes only url is changes in this case i have to change only config will it work?
as long as you don;t have security turned on this should be fine just changing the address. If you have security enabled then there are two issues to be aware of
If they are using SSL then you need to make sure that the certificate authority they are using is trusted on the client machine
If the client is identifying the remote machine by DNS then if you want to support more than one remote mahcine you have to switch to somethinglike certificate reference
in this case only changing the config will work.
The add web reference just contacts the meta data exchange endpoint and downloads the wsdl, which it then uses to generate the client side code to comply with the contract. you don't need to do this, you could hand craft the correct client side code, or share libraries with the server to have the same client side code.
Once you have this the client and server communicate with soap messages generated from that code. It is these soap messages that are important. As long as the server recieves correctly constructed messages and the client correctly decodes the messages from the server everything will work. The fact that it is now hosted on another server is moot.
Remember your service could be called by a client which is not .net based, so all that client side code could be generated in a different language, or the messages could be sent by someone manipulating the bits with magnets
Here is my scenario:
I have a proxy that actually has the SSL Cert installed and this sits in front of a load balanced web farm. Each IIS server does not have SSL so I can't use transport security via wsHttp binding. I have not investigated basicHttp because we want to provide SOAP 1.2 going forward w/ this solution. In addition to this, my network team won't allow any use of certs to encrypt at the message level. (this alone would solve my dilemma i'm sure)
My security group has a requirement that we use Forms Authentication (membership provider).
The final solution must allow SSL via the front proxy, yet some type of WCF binding to keep complexity encapsulated in a config file.
I was working with a custom binding that allowed for username/password sent via clear text, but when I try to connect via https i get the usual "http expected" uri error.
How can I use SSL via the proxy to connect securely from client app to web service, but not have SSL installed on IIS and leverage the WCF stack + forms authentication?
I'm not new to WCF, but this very custom setup seems to have me unsure if the requirements allow for any type "easy" solution.
Thank you in advance!
EDIT: I did finally get this working and decided to write a short blog post with complete source code required to write the custom binding.
I think this is similar to a problem many have had when wanting to provide WCF services over SSL when the actual service in IIS is behind an SSL-offloading device. In which case, the following two pages should help you out:
http://blog.hackedbrain.com/archive/2006/09/26/5281.aspx
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/87a254c8-e9d1-4d4c-8f62-54eae497423f/
Basically you need to lie to WCF and say that the service is secure, even though the traffic will be conducted over HTTP (between the service and the proxy).