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.

Answer 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?

Answer 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

Answer 3

Since you are setting clientCredentialType = "Basic" , you will not get a Windows identity from WCF. If you use "Windows" instead of "Basic" and you configure WCF to support for impersonation as shown in this blog post , you should be able to get the identity user name.