If you want your WCF service to use certificate-based (X.509) certification to authenticate the users accessing your service, you’ll need to provide the right configuration on both the client and the server side. The keyword here is configuration. When I first started searching for a solution I knew it had to be done in the configuration file, but, as usual, I kind of underestimated the amount of configuring that had to be done.
Especially when you’re looking at the generated configuration file provided by Visual Studio, it’s easy to get lost in all the possible security settings. I once attended a course given by Juval Löwy (IDesign) on WCF where he applauded the fact that the WCF-team had made everything configurable and at the same time warned us for the complexity that came with it.
The solution: There is a easy-to-follow example where you can learn how certificate-based authentication for WCF can be done at Mitch Denny’s blog - Using Certificate-based Authentication and Protection with Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
He starts out by creating a simple WCF service (with 1 HelloWorld-method) and afterwards adding the authentication configuration.
915af5cd-39a8-48ee-82a0-cd29270e89c6|0|.0