I am on a project that uses web services to communicate with hand held devices (Symbol MC70s running windows mobile 5).
We need to make sure that others on the internet can't connect to the web services and start sending info.
I have made a certificate so that the hand held will only connect to my services, but I don't know how to make sure that my services will only connect to my hand held devices.
My app is coded in the .NET Compact Framework and I am using Visual Studio 2008 SP1. My services are hosted in IIS and are coded with WCF in C# (.NET 3.5 sp1).
Any ideas?
Password-protect the services. Alternatively, authenticate the client by the client SSL certificate and issue those to your users.
No way to lock access down to a specific device. A device can be spoofed fairly easily.
When you say that you've "... made a certificate so that the hand held will only connect to my services", are you saying that the device uses https to the web service or that the device is locked down to only connect to the web service http URL?
Anyway, if you are concerned about the data pulled from the web service, you could encrypt it with a key known to your device.
Related
I am accessing a third party web api from my WCF application. While development I was able to access those APIs but when I deployed my WCF to IIS, its not able to connect to the web API and throwing me the following error:
"System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it X.X.X.X:443"
Just to make sure that my server is fine where I deployed my WCF. I tried accessing those web api from a simple console application. It accessed those apis from my development machine and from the server machine as well. Now I feel the culprit is not the third party web api server, but something goes wrong when a WCF service access' a web-api hosted in IIS.
Please help!!!
Finally I found the issue. IIS runs my WCF under user 'network service' or 'application pool identity'. These are nothing but window built-in users which has limited access. When I tried accessing third party API from the console application it worked because it was running under my user credential which has admin credential. So I concluded that when an application making cross-domain call then it should be running under a user with enough credential to make such calls.
Solution was to change my application pool identity to a admin user identity (I changed it to my logged in user). It worked and making calls to third party API from WCF service
I currently have a Mobile Application that communicates through a WCF Service to access a Database. The Mobile App can access on the network as well as externally. It connects to the WCF Service which is hosted on one server inside the network. From there the WCF Service is pointing at another server which is hosting the Database that the Mobile Device is accessing.
With the above process how would you setup authentication using Active Directory which would confirm the user of the Mobile Application before it can access the WCF Service to confirm that the user is a member of AD and they can then login after authorization is complete. This would occur as the user opens up the Application. Would this be coded into the App to prompt for the information, then send the information to the WCF Service which would then allow access? If not this then are there any other ways or information/links that can be provided please?
Take a look at the BUILD 2013 videos. Visual Studio 2013 will create a webproject that will automagically do all that for you (I think). Just bare in mind, it uses the Microsoft.OWin.Security beta packages.
Also...you will need to install the AspNetWebTools2013 package first...
http://www.asp.net/visual-studio/overview/2013/creating-web-projects-in-visual-studio#orgauthoptions
I have been struggling with setting up an iOS (Objective-C) app which utilizes the Service Management APIs. I've successfully was able to get Storage API calls working fine, but from what I'm reading, one big difference between the two Azure APIs seems to be a matter of authentication. For reference, what I'd ideally like to do is setup a simple API call to list the Hosted Services accounts in an app (eventually geared for public deployment).
According to the API Azure documentation, the Service Management APIs require a management certificate (.cer) to be uploaded and then for the client to utilize that cert to authenticate the request. My hunch is that this will prevent an app like the one I want to create from being feasible by any means, since public users with devices containing the downloaded app won't have that cert or the ability to attach it programatically in the objective-c code.
Is my hunch correct on this? Is this a forlorn idea that should not be pursued? I would think for this to be possible, the user would be required to upload their device's cert file to Azure somehow, and then to somehow have the app use this cert for authentication. I'm a bit lost on where to even begin on that, even if it is possible. :(
Any helpful info would be greatly appreciated. I have a lot of experience in the iOS side of things, but specifically in authentication/certificates of this type, I unfortunately have minimal experience.
Thanks in advance!!
-Vincent
Actually, I have an app that does exactly what you're talking about. CloudTools for Windows Azure is an iOS app that uses the Azure Management Service API to perform Azure management. It's been on iTunes for over a year.
Your question is somewhat broad, but I can tell you that the certificate issues were by far the biggest issues in designing/developing the app. You can't store the certificate in keychain, because keychain works in a manner such as this: a) you request a remote url that requires a certificate; b) that url tells you that it needs a certificate and c) keychain provides an appropriate certificate. It's a multi-request process. That won't work for Azure, because Azure service management APIs expect the initial call to include the certificate.
I require the users to add their certificate through iTunes File Sharing (steps here). Of course, they have to upload the public key portion to Azure. Then, I provide the certificate and private key with each request. I use the HTTP library ASIHttpRequest, although I believe that the latest (iOS 5.x) Apple libraries have similar functionality.
I'd be happy to provide any further details if you have any follow-up questions.
With Windows Azure, if you are using Service Management API then you really need to have certificate based authentication to create a SSL tunnel between your machine which is requesting the connection and Windows Azure Management Portal. I am not sure how wide your iOS application distribution is.
My first thought is that why would you want to deploy Windows Azure application from an iOS application, are you going to build application in iOS devices and deploy? Windows Azure Application deployment is mostly done on client machines so, Azure application management on iOS is great idea, however Application deployment from iOS not sure why. May be you are on something big here.. In both cases you really need Service Management Certificate on iOS device. If it is an enterprise app where you can let users to install Service Management certificate, it would be easier for iOS devices to use Service Mgmt API.
So if you want to use Service Management API from a client iOS app, I think the best solution will be to have WCF service hosted in Windows Azure which is configured to directly connect with your Windows Azure Portal. And from your iOS app, you just make call to your WCF service. This is very popular method to access service management API (through WCF Service) from any client app (WP7, iOS, Android) and the client side code is very light. On other hand you may need to pay to host a WCF service on Windows Azure.
I have created and tested a WCF REST service that is protected with SSL and Windows Authentication through IIS 7. I have also created and tested a pure html/javascript web client that is hosted in IIS 7 that is protected with SSL and Windows Authentication -- same server, different "site" within IIS. The REST service is not public, but the web client is.
Without security, everything works beautifully, but now we are ready for field testing and security must be implemented.
My end goal is to have the user visit mywebclient.com and authenticate using their Active Directory accounts. Initially I thought it would be safe to leave the service calls from the client to the REST service unprotected (since the traffic from the web client to the web service would be internal), but this does not protect us from an internal attacker. Also, in the future, the REST services will be available to handhelds through native applications.
I've tried to gain as much information on this subject as possible, but every piece of Microsoft documentation contains client examples written in .NET.
How can I share the security context between these sites without converting the web client to a .NET-based application? Could this be accomplished by combining the web client and service into one IIS "site"?
Edit: If the client and service exist in the same app pool, does that mean they could share authentication information between client and server processes?
I have client apps that talk to my silverlight application and its web services. So the client app is running on the client machine and making calls directly to the silverlight app running on the machine and also making web service calls.
I want the usernames/password security to be handled by the 3rd party client app.
Any idea how I can do this?
I'd try the Application Scenario's, Guidelines and How Tos sections of this CodePlex Link. You should be able to find a scenario that matches closely to yours and follow the guidelines and configuration to get yourself going.
If I've understood this correctly, the client application would pass a username/password to your silverlight app which would require a wsHttpBinding that has clientCredentials="Username". You would need to be able to authenticate this against a user store configured on your server, for example you could configure a SQL Server provider.
I'm not sure how your 3rd party client app works, but you would require a seperate security configuration for that communication. You could use a less secure binding if the apps were on the same machine and possibly use clientCredentials="Windows"/"None"/"Basic".
Difficult to advise further without knowing your exact situation. What do you have so far?