Tag Archives: client certificates

Finally: Create a Client Certificate in the Browser

Since Google and Mozilla have removed the <keygen> element we use from the HTML standard and from their browsers, we have endeavoured to provide a valid replacement so that client certificates can once again be created so easily that even my grandmother could do it.

Finding a solution was not easy; other CAs were also sweating bullets here. The solution that we have been offering for some time now was initially somewhat hidden, but has since been prominently linked as the seventh service on our community portal community.cacert.org.

Both the new solution and the community portal are the result of the tireless work of a small group of volunteers. As a small thank you, you can make their work easier by not having to worry about CAcert’s operating costs. Donation account CAcert: IBAN CH02 0077 4010 3947 4420 0 or with bank or credit card.

WordPress Client Certificate Authentication

Client Certificate Authentication is possible for the CAcert Blog for some time. Now, the code was put into an own plugin and published to the wordpress plugin directory. You can also install the plugin directly from your wordpress admin interface to use it in your own blog.

Acknowledgements: This plugin is based on the HTTP Authentication plugin by Daniel Westermann-Clark. Ideas taken from Dan B.’s implementation for client certificate authentication.

svn.cacert.org on new host with client certificate authentication now!

Today I finished the migration of svn.cacert.org to a LXC container on our new infrastructure machine. The container is running on Debian Squeeze and supports some nice new features:

Read only access is provided via http://svn.cacert.org/ as it was before.

Besides allowing client certificate authentication for our Subversion repository this is a big step forward as we now have a modern infrastructure machine with a recent operating system distribution.

If you already have a SVN account on svn.cacert.org and want to use the client certificate authentication feature please send a mail to svn-admin (at) cacert (dot) org.