WCF error: “The X.509 certificate CN=localhost chain building failed …”

Question

I\'m getting this error while attempting to make my WCF client and server talk to each other.

The X.509 certificate CN=localhost chain building faile

Answer 1

I fixed the problem by turning off validation in my code like this:

client.ClientCredentials.ServiceCertificate.Authentication.CertificateValidationMode = 
System.ServiceModel.Security.X509CertificateValidationMode.None;

Where client is an instance of my service reference.

Answer 2

The correct thing to do is to setup your own Dev/Test Trusted Root Certificate and sign your client and service certificates with this.

Bypassing chain trust in your Dev/Test environment may "work" but your Dev/Test environment is now configured differently to Production, which is not a great idea as you may find some tests produce false positives or false negatives.