do i need ssl on my web application?

Question

I have an application which is structured as: Web Application - WCF Service - Database

All communicate to and from the database goes through the WCF Service, the Web Application is not able to directly talk to the database. I needed to protect the data as it travels across, so i setup SSL on my local machine to test and configured it in IIS, so now the WCF Service has to be hit using HTTPS. However, I did not setup my Web Application to use HTTPS, is that ok? I thought since the WCF Service is doing all the transferring of data, it's the only one that needs HTTPS.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you're interested in encrypting your data, you need to make sure it's passed encrypted on all tiers of your application. From your description it seems that the data passed from the user to the WebApplication itself is unencrypted and therefor passed in clear text. This means that anyone that "listens" to the traffic between your users and the Web Application can intercept the data.

I recommend adding SSL on the Web Application too, to make sure that your data passes encrypted through all 3 tiers of your application.