Windows Vista Beta | WinVistaBeta.com - Message | SSL Certs or CardSpace for Client Certificates with WCF

July 19, 2008  
Subject: SSL Certs or CardSpace for Client Certificates with WCF
Group: microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.indigo,microsoft.public.windows.developer.winfx.sdk
Date: 10/16/2006 12:42:43 PM
From: "Chris Mullins" [Email Address Protection]

We're currently designing a number of SOA Services that will be built using
WCF.

We'll be having a number of applications (dozens to low hundreds) connecting
to these services and performing actions that must be robustly
authenticated.

We're looking at two options for doing this:
1 - Generate an SSL Certificate per application, register that cert in our
DB of "Acceptable" certs, and use this for tracking what applications are
performing what actions on the system. This is standard, seems to be deeply
supported by WCF, and should suitable for cross-platform use.

2 - We were also toying with the idea of generating CardSpace Identies for
each of the applications that connect, and performing authentication that
way. Cardspace Identies seem to have a few plusses, in that they're easier
to generate and make use of. The people who start to shake when they hear
"SSL Certificate Generation" seem to be able to handle CardSpace stuff.

Is there any broad support for using CardSpace in this way? In essence, I'm
looking for a set of CardSpace configuration tags in WCF, and the ability to
use CardSpace from other platforms.

I'm 85%+ that we'll go with the SSL Solution, but I wanted to get other
people's opinions. I don't really have a solid enough grasp yet of CardSpace
to know if it is the right/wrong tool for the job.

Any advice?

--
Chris Mullins MCSD.Net, MCPD Enterprise
http://www.coversant.net/blogs/cmullins



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