Setting Identifier / Principal from MessageInspector to WCF

Question

I am developing a WCF service that gets user credentials in a SOAP header. These credentials are read on the server side using MessageInspector. So far so good.

I want to set Thread.CurrentPrincipal for a custom principal (CustomPrincipal), but when I do this from MessageInspector, it becomes overridden by the time the service starts. When is the best time to set up a principal? What is the best way to transfer the principal, ID, or credentials from the inspector to this place?

Answer 1

Rory has a message that describes a solution to this problem. http://www.neovolve.com/2008/04/07/wcf-security-getting-the-password-of-the-user/

Answer 2

IIRC, for this you need to set the permission mode to "user" and use the authorization policy, so>. As far as I know, calling IAuthorizationPolicy.Evaluate is the only place you expect you to put a principal, and when I tried it without using IAuthorizationPolicy , it dropped my principal (which makes sense, since there is no guarantee that WCF will use one and the same stream at every point in the pipeline).

Answer 3

Just note that if you host WCF services in IIS, you can enable aspnet compatibility behavior for your service. In this case, you can install HttpConext.Current.User for the user you just authenticated in your message inspector.