RE: Can I serialize cached credentials for later authentication on server?

Hi Bill,

Based on my understanding, your client application is communicating with a
Web Service on another machine. When the network is unavailable for client
machine, your client application will send all the request to a Windows
Service application on the same client machine so that this Windows Service
application can cache the requests and resend these requests to Web
Services for authentication after network is ok. If I have misunderstood
you, please feel free to tell me, thanks.

Normally, in this scenario, the recommended solution is letting the Windows
Service impersonating the client application account. With impersonating
the client application in the Windows Service thread, this impersonating
thread can send the request to the Web Service on behalf of the client
application with the same security context. So the integrated Windows
authentication on IIS will help to authenticate the Windows Service thread
request correctly. The problem is that while the Windows Service thread is
serving request from client application the network is still unavailable,
although this thread can impersonate as the client account, it still can
not communicate with the remote Web Service. To resolve this issue, my
thought is storing the client request security token in the Windows Service
application for caching. After the network is available, the Windows
Service application will detect this and retrieve the previous stored token
and call SetThreadToken to impersonate as the client application. Now, the
Windows Service thread is acting as the client application account, it can
communicate with the Web Service of remote machine and let IIS authenticate
the impersonated account.

Does this logic meet your need?

The problem of this approach is that the user that is using the client
machine may just log off from the client machine before the network is
available, so the entire logon session may be destroyed. Since the token is
a structure pointed to the logon session, I suspect if the cached token in
the Windows Service is valid anymore. I will try to consult internally to
make this problem clear. I will get back to you ASAP. Thanks.

Best regards,
Jeffrey Tan
Microsoft Online Community Support
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