WCF Service Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority

Question

I have my WCF service running in HTTP. I want to make my service run in HTTPS. I did this in my local with self seigned certificate and its working fine. But I'm getting

"Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority"

error when I deployed my code in QA environment and created Self signed certificate for the same. I found some solution to validate the certificate at client side (Link). But I'm looking for some solution to fix this from server side. I don't want to disturb the client.

Answer 1

I suspect the error reflect that the client does not recognize your self-signed certificate or the underlying certificate authority. As such, until the client adds the client certificate to their certificate store or otherwise trusts the certificate, the only way they will be able to access the service is via a validation workaround like the one reflected in the link you included.

In order to determine the underlying cause of the issue, you may want to enable WCF Tracing and review the exceptions (especially inner exceptions).

My team supports many WCF connections protected by mutual certificate authentication. We have noticed that the error top level error may not provide as much information as the inner exception. Just yesterday, I had a site with that exact error. When we looked in the trace file, we saw an inner exception revealing that the certificate had not been deployed to the certificate store in the proper location. A few days previously, the “could not establish trust relationship” error had an underlying inner exception that revealed the certificate had been revoked by the certificate authority.

Hope this helps.
Regards,