SSL with Self-hosted WCF Service

Introduction

In order to perform any kind of SSL encryption between a client and a server, there need to be certificates in place. Certificates can seem a bit arcane to the uninitiated, especially when mixed in with some bizarre WCF configuration settings, but never fear, it's all here.

The reason I'm writing this article (my first) is that I really battled to get this working, and the information I need was scattered all over the place. I also ran into a lot of runtime errors which ended up being caused by setup issues much earlier in the process. Very very annoying. Hopefully this will save someone some trouble!

I'm assuming that you are familiar with the basics of WCF and are comfortable with configuration files and the like. I'm not including any source code as the service itself is actually not particularly important, SSL is all about setup.

Certificates

This example assumes that you (like me) don't have access to a nice shiny Certificate Authority (CA) and need to make use of the makecert tool. (Sparse information can be found here.)

Note: I have recently discovered this nifty Website, a free CA, who would have thought about it.

You need one certificate (cert) to act as your root authority, and one to act as the actual certificate to be used for the SSL, which needs to be signed by your root authority. If you don't set up the root authority your single certificate won't be trusted, and you will start to discover this through a series of extremely annoying WCF exceptions, long after the fact. 

The following command (run in a the Visual Studio command prompt) will create your root certificate, no, I didn't come up with this myself, you can find some nice examples all over the place, for example here).

Read more: Codeproject

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