Programming WCF Services, 3rd Edition

Service Bus Authentication

If anyone were allowed to relay messages to your service, or if any service could receive your client calls, the service bus would be a dangerous proposition. The service bus mandates that the service must always authenticate itself in order to connect to the service bus and receive relayed messages. Clients, on the other hand, may or may not authenticate themselves. Typically (and by default), the clients do authenticate against the service bus, but the relayed service may decide to waive the client’s service bus authentication. Note that this kind of authentication is application authentication, rather than individual user authentication.

As mentioned previously, the service bus utilizes the ACS of the Windows Azure AppFabric platform. The client and the service need to present a security token issued by the ACS. Using the service namespace portal pages, the service namespace administrator creates and assigns such tokens in the form of keys (see Figure 11-16).

Figure 11-16. Configuring secret keys

Each of the keys is a string of 47 characters long representing the shared secret.

These keys (and their issuer) must be known to the client and the service when authenticating against the service bus. The keys can be used to both authenticate and authorize sending messages and receiving messages, as well as managing the service namespace. In addition, the service ...