ONVIF Authentication in .NET 4.0 with Visual Studios 2010

Question

My task is to try to establish a communication with a ONVIF camera in the building to, eventually, upgrade the company's domotic solution to automatically recognize ONVIF cameras and to be able to set them up and to use their services.

I am already able to gather some basic informations like its model, its MAC address and its firmware version this way:

    EndpointAddress endPointAddress = new EndpointAddress("<mycameraurl:<mycameraport>/onvif/device_service");
    CustomBinding bind = new CustomBinding("DeviceBinding");
    DeviceClient temp = new DeviceClient(bind, endPointAddress);
    String[] arrayString = new String[4];
    String res = temp.GetDeviceInformation(out arrayString[0], out arrayString[1], out arrayString[2], out  arrayString[3]);
    MessageBox.Show("Model " + arrayString[0] + ", FirmwareVersion " + arrayString[1] + ", SerialNumber " + arrayString[2] + ", HardwareId " + arrayString[3]);

I have this xml specification for the customBinding in my app.config file:

  <customBinding>
    <binding name="DeviceBinding">
      <textMessageEncoding maxReadPoolSize="64" maxWritePoolSize="16"
          messageVersion="Soap12" writeEncoding="utf-8">
        <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384"
            maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" />
      </textMessageEncoding>
      <httpTransport manualAddressing="false" maxBufferPoolSize="524288"
          maxReceivedMessageSize="65536" allowCookies="false" authenticationScheme="Anonymous"
          bypassProxyOnLocal="false" decompressionEnabled="true" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard"
          keepAliveEnabled="false" maxBufferSize="65536" proxyAuthenticationScheme="Anonymous"
          realm="" transferMode="Buffered" unsafeConnectionNtlmAuthentication="false"
          useDefaultWebProxy="true" />
    </binding>
  </customBinding>

My problem is that it's impossible for me to go deeper into what I can ask the camera. I get "400 - Bad request" errors for anything I try, and according to what I have read it's because I need to handle authentication for the camera.

The problem is that, everything I find about WS-Security (which seems to be used by the ONVIF) is really, really confused, with a lot of different solutions, and nothing really working for me. For example, this post here make it sound very simple, but I've tried to create a UserNameSecurityToken and I still get 400 bad request errors. Since I don't know if that's because I've written my Token system wrong, if it's because the camera doesn't support what I try to do.

I've already tried WSHttpBinding and putting it in Username mode, but using WSHttpBinding break the basic information discovery I was able to create (with a MustUnderstand error)...

Any pointers for me? Simple WS-Security/.NET, C#/ONVIF tutorials, everything will be accepted.

Solution

All right:

EndpointAddress serviceAddress = new EndpointAddress("<mycameraurl:<mycameraport>/onvif/device_service");

HttpTransportBindingElement httpBinding = new HttpTransportBindingElement();

httpBinding.AuthenticationScheme = AuthenticationSchemes.Digest;

var messageElement = new TextMessageEncodingBindingElement();

messageElement.MessageVersion = MessageVersion.CreateVersion(EnvelopeVersion.Soap12, AddressingVersion.None);

CustomBinding bind = new CustomBinding(messageElement, httpBinding);

// Add our custom behavior - this require the Microsoft WSE 3.0 SDK

PasswordDigestBehavior behavior = new PasswordDigestBehavior(CameraASCIIStringLogin, CameraASCIIStringPassword);

DeviceClient client = new DeviceClient(bind, serviceAddress);

client.Endpoint.Behaviors.Add(behavior);

// We can now ask for information

client.GetSystemDateAndTime();

client.GetNetworkInterfaces();

client.GetScopes();

client.GetRelayOutputs();

client.GetWsdlUrl();

The problem was that the camera required authentication before giving any information beyond the simplest ones, and the trickiest part was to finally catch a working xml onvif message to recreate it in my own software.

Comments

[Security Hound]

This is a side note...The fact you seem to indicate that you are new to C# and you were able to get this far is impressive.

[user704419]

Well i've done JAVA for years, and in the end it's definitively easier than some years ago, now you can usually find little code snippets on the internet

[Jesse Chisholm]

For those not familiar with PasswordDigestBehavior, see this blog post: blog.benpowell.co.uk/2010/11/…