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258

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I have a website in which I want to be able to detect a certain user based upon a permanent attribute of a specific user.

My original plan was to use an ip address but those are difficult to maintain since they can change frequently. Cookie's and Sessions are almost out of question because they expire and tend to be difficult to manipulate.

Basically what i want to be able to do is detect if the current client visiting the website is a special user without having to deal with logins / passwords. To use something more permanent.

The user agent plugin could work but then, if i ever upgrade firefox or whatever i would have to go in and manually update the user agent string.

I found this script: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6895 but it doesn't work for newest version of firefox 3. It would be a perfect solution because it sends special headers at specific websites.

Short of writing my own extension does anyone have ideas of what to do? Do i need an extension? Should i try to write my own?

+1  A: 

You could generate a SSL client certificate, and have your users install it. From then on, their browser would identify them using their certificate.

John Millikin