Journey to robust webservices: kickstarting use of certificates phase II: using certificates for client authentication

There are a number of means of authenticating users, and one of the most secure is via a certificate. This article on CodeProject provides a start. Unfortunately, the article doesn't really mention a few things:

1. Depending on how you ran the tools, you may have inadvertently run the commands it gives you as an administrator. I ran them in a console that I already had open that was running as administrator, so they were installed as administrator, and I also happened to have been running in Visual Studio as an administrator at the time, so everything happily worked. Then when I rebooted my machine this morning and was running as a normal user, nothing worked, and I wasted over an hour trying to figure out why. That was why. Regardless of how you generated and installed the keys, you should go and explicitly grant permissions on the key to the users you want to have access to them. On the Microsoft website, there is a bundle of WCF samples (which you can find here). Included in the samples is a tool called FindPrivateKey. Download the samples, compile the program, and use it to find the key that you just generated. You'll need a command similar to the following : "C:\Samples\WCFWFCardSpace\WCF\Tools\FindPrivateKey\CS\bin\FindPrivateKey.exe My LocalMachine -t "28 ce e3 2c 7e 05 3a 97 a0 b4 92 fd d5 b0 f9 de 0e 4c 2e 4b"" where the value in quotes is the thumbprint of the non-signing (client) key you generated in the instructions from the article. Once it spits out the location of the file, you'll need to go and alter its permissions to allow whatever user your server / client application is running under access to the file.
2. Depending on the binding you're using with WCF on the server side, you may need to have a certificate with full chain trust on the IIS server (or other?) in order to use the binding (*cough* basicHttpBinding and any other transport-only security bindings *cough*). With that in mind, after you've generated the certificates in the article, while you're in the certificate manager MMC snap-in, you'll also need to copy (not move) the IIS developer certificate used in IIS to the "Trusted Root Certification Authorities" store.