Get username in WCF service using basic auth with IIS

Question

I have a WCF service running in IIS Express on my local machine. I'm using HTTP Basic Authentication (without SSL at the moment). I have a test client that I'm using to call my server.

I need the name of the user that initiated the request (the username portion of the basic auth authentication). I realize that IIS is handling the authentication for me and is checking the username/password against Windows user accounts. That is fine for my purposes. My issue is that once my service is called I can't find the username anywhere. I assumed it would be in the Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity.Name, but that value is an empty string. Is there a way to access this value?

Here is binding in case it is relevant:

<basicHttpBinding>
<binding name="basicauth" closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" 
receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00" allowCookies="false" 
bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" 
maxBufferSize="99999999" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="99999999" 
messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" transferMode="Buffered" 
useDefaultWebProxy="true">
      <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384" 
maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" />
  <security mode="TransportCredentialOnly">
    <transport clientCredentialType="Basic" realm="" />
  </security>          
</binding>
</basicHttpBinding>

UPDATE: Thanks everyone. Figured out my issue. I had improperly associated my endpoint and my binding so the endpoint was defaulting to some dynamic binding. Even though I configured my binding for basic auth the endpoint was not setup to use it.

Once I fixed this issue the username was present in the

ServiceSecurityContext.Current.WindowsIdentity.Name

property like expected.

Solution 1

Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity.Name will normally retrieve the identity under which the WCF worker thread is being executed in IIS. This is not particularly useful information. Have you inspected ServiceSecurityContext.Current.PrimaryIdentity.Name to see if it contains the authentication information from the server?

Solution 2

This may work - it works for windows auth. Can't remember if it works for basic ... worth a try.

OperationContext.Current.ServiceSecurityContext.WindowsIdentity.Name

Comments

[knms]

The ServiceSecurityContext.Current property is null unfortunately.

[lsuarez]

@knms: Sounds like the service isn't interpreting the server variables into a meaningful security context. I'll investigate further. Out of curiosity, which version of IIS?

[knms]

Thanks for the link. I will try it, but my understanding is using Windows as opposed to Basic results in NTLM authentication rather than a simple username/password passed in the HTTP header. That is not what I'm looking for. Is it really impossible to get the credentials passed in the header once in the service? That seems odd.

[Sixto Saez]

Unless you implement either a custom soap header or custom authentication, WCF out-of-box won't support accessing basic HTTP authentication credentials.