I am working on an ASP.NET WebForms application, and I have been asked to switch from Windows Form Authentication to PKI Certificate Authentication; something I know very little about.
After reviewing various web posts and their code snippets, I thought I knew enough to at least begin sniffing a PKI Certificate (or any client certificate for that matter). Specifically I am using:
X509Certificate2 cert = new X509Certificate2(Page.Request.ClientCertificate.Certificate);
X500DistinguishedName dn = cert.SubjectName;
So I put a breakpoint on the 2nd line, hit F5 from Visual Studio. Debugging starts, but ‘cert’ is always null. I then realize that I have no Personal certs on my computer, so I download the Firefox add-on Key-Manager, create a dummy certificate, and try again with the same result, ‘cert’ is always null.
So then, I start screwing around with the command-line tool makecert, but still ‘cert’ is always null.
I am using IIS Express 7.5 for debugging purposes, tried both http and https.
What do I need to do to attach the personal cert to any web requests, and have them get picked up by my ASP.NET application?
Do you have IIS express setup to require client certs?
Please look here for a similar question/answer:
https://serverfault.com/questions/309690/how-to-configure-iis-express-to-ask-for-client-certificate
http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/security/authentication/iisClientCertificateMappingAuthentication