CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#wcfsslhttps
vetti
vetti

Reputation: 309

Self hosted C# SSL web server without requiring admin rights

We have self-hosted C# WCF service providing rest API over HTTPS.

Problem:Configuring the certificates for SSL requires admin rights. I assume it is to do with WCF depends on http.sys for http/https handling. The service is meant to be deployed on customer environments. So it would be nice if it can run without requiring admin rights.

Looks like WCF depends on http.sys,
Can I self-host an HTTPS service in WCF without the certificate store and without using netsh http add sslcert?

Like to know if any other embedded web server solution exist that support SSL and not requiring admin rights on the machine?

Checked so far,
http://nancyfx.org/
https://github.com/pvginkel/NHttp

Both doesn't seem to support SSL.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 2708

Answers (1)

Yoad Snapir
Yoad Snapir

Reputation: 538

Most windows hosted web stacks rely on the HTTP Server API which is the API around the kernel HTTP stack (a.k.a HTTP.sys). The .Net HttpListener class does so as well (same as WCF, the OWIN self hosted asp.Net and so on which rely on it).

Just making sure, you do know you can authorize the identity you application runs under to bind to an HTTPS URL even if it's not running as an admin account, right? If you could gain admin right just for the installation phase that could solve you problem? (assuming you checked that already) You can read more on a blog post i wrote about that here

To go into the effort of building an http stack on top of raw sockets would be a great effort and with little gain and so around .Net i doublt you would find anything like that.

Unless, it wished to be cross platform.
Any java based web server would probably do just that, using the JVM's http stack and relying on a java keystore to provide the required certificates for the SSL. (To keep it portable across different OS's)
If you wanna go java i am sure you can find many such web servers.

If you care to try and bind to a web server using CGI have a look at mongoose (Never used it to be honest).

Another option which comes to mind is to use an ssl proxy like Stunnel to stand in front of the web server. It would do the SSL part using non-windows certificate store.

Upvotes: 1

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