Best practice for storing cross domain web service access credentials?

Question

I'm working on an application that will connect to various remote servers using a Web Service to retrieve some status information about those ( Windows ) machines.

It works well within a single domain where we can just use Windows Authentication and ensure that the user calling the services has the correct credentials. However if we are working across domains that is not going to work- we're going to need to store a set of credentials for a user with the requisite rights on the application side.

Is there a standard way of storing credentials for these purposes, some kind of central password store in Windows or a handy built in library to provide this kind of functionality? If not, what is the best approach to keeping the passwords on the central machine safe and make sure the remote machine credentials are available when those services need to be called?

I would expect this application to mostly be installed on one of the Windows Server operating systems- 2003 or 2008 - if that makes any difference to what is available.

Answer 1

I suggest you have a look at "Windows Identity Foundation". It may be overkill for you, or the prerequisite may not match, but it's anyway worth reading as its very instructive in terms of claims based architecture with Microsoft technology.

The two principal white papers for developers are:

• Overview of the Claims Based Architecture
• Microsoft Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) Whitepaper for Developers