Ways to restrict WCF Service so only our apps can access it

I have a public WCF Service.

I have a WPF Desktop app & a silverlight app. My apps does not have any login requ开发者_高级运维irements.

I want to make it difficult for another developer / website to make use of my service.

What's the best way to restrict access to my service? Use SSL and have the desktop / silverlight app store a token inside of it?

Yes, having a token / certificate be part of your installation is probably the most efficient way to make sure only computers with your own software will be able to access the service.

Also: do not publish the WSDL, e.g. turn off all metadata endpoints and "HTTP Get URL" and so on - don't publish your presence to everyone surfing around! ;-)

In addition, your app could also send some specific headers - although those are fairly easy to find and decipher.

And last but not least: you could come up with your own whacky binding, e.g. have some oddball combination, possibly your own serializer or message formatter. That's taking it quite far already, but it would definitely be possible to put up some hurdles there, too.