An error occurred when verifying security for the message

Question

When I try to call a WCF service I am getting the following message \"An error occurred when verifying security for the message.\"

When I remove the custom authenica

Answer 1

I was getting the same error and none of the above help for me.

I finally tracked it down to connectionStrings in a parent web.config (my service was deployed to a child application to an admin site).

Yes sounds ridiculous, but as soon as I wrapped the connection strings in the parent web.config with a location element all started working.

For clarity, in parent web.config, I changed this

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="..." />
</connectionStrings>

to this

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
    <connectionStrings>
        <add name="..." />
    </connectionStrings>
</location>

Note this error also resulted in this very unhelpful serviceSecurityAudit log message:

Message authentication failed.
Service: ...
Action: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/02/trust/RST/SCT
ClientIdentity:
ActivityId:
ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: manager

Answer 2

I was getting the same error on my IIS 7.5 server. I forgot to add Read permission on the certificate's private key to the app pool virtual account (e.g. IIS AppPool\ASP.NET v4.0).

For info, whilst testing various combinations of accounts and permissions, I noticed that the app pool needed to be recycled to lose access to the key, once it had been retrieved once.

(0x80131501 - An error occurred when verifying security for the message.)