SSL certificate for WCF service hosted on windows service

Question

My Application while installing will create and run a wcf service hosted on windows in the target machine. I have decided to use the service over HTTPS. I have tested it with self signed certificate. But when it is deployed in a different machine, the name of the service will differ from the one which is in the certificate. How can I handle this situation ? Moreover I am unaware of the PC name (which I could use for service end point) before the installation of the application in the deployment machine.

Answer 1

For the client to trust the certificate the Subject name on the cert will have to match the DNS name of the machine on which the service is running - there really is no way round this. The idea is the client is able to verify they really are talking to the machine they think they are and someone hasn't directed them to a different machine by, say, poisoning the local DNS

Only the client can decide to relax that restriction by loosening validation of the server certificate