A number of components of the Windows Azure platform are exposed using Internet protocols. There are a number of storage components exposed with Windows Azure Platform. Hence, these components need to be secured behind a valid authentication. Windows Azure Storage Service manages the storage of blobs, queues, and tables. Each storage account has an account name and an access key that are used to authenticate to access the storage service.

The storage service supports Hash-based Message Authentication (HMAC) in which the storage operation request is hashed with the access key such that upon receiving the request, the storage service validates it and either accepts or denies it. The Windows Azure storage client library provides several classes that support various ways to create HMAC, which hides the complexity of creating and using messages.

The Windows Azure SDK provides a compute and storage emulator. It points to the localhost (127.0...