Temporarily load SSL Client Key for Client Authentication in C#

Question

I am using the WebBrowser control to add a WebInterface to C# app. My desire is to verify that only such app is able to connect to our Web server using SSL client certificates.

My idea was to embed the client certificate in the app and just use when connecting via my app. Anybody have a sugestion on how to do this? Or the only way to make it work is to load the key in the X509Store.

If I put it in X509Store, will it make my key available for general Internet Explorer Usage?

Answer 1

Are you sure this is what you want to do? If you embed the private key in your application (as your approach entails), an attacker can extract it and use it to authenticate their rogue software.

A server cannot authenticate client software. It can only test whether a client possesses some secret. When you embed a private key in your client and distribute it, it will not be a secret anymore.

I'd recommend authenticating users of your software, rather than the software itself. You need to let users generate their own secret, whether it is a password or a private key, and give them an incentive to protect it.

Answer 2

The intent of using the key is not so much to validate the users as to restrict access to users of the app instead of using any WebBrowser. This is sort of an intranet behavior over the public internet.

This is a poor man's DRM. The losses due to people extracting the key are not that important. I think the risk of this happening is low and what we could loose is minimal.

Nevertheless if there is any other idea to restrict access to the WebServer to only users of the App I am open for any suggestions. Basically my desire is now to have a public WebServer wide open to be read by anyone, but access over the public network from diverse places is necessary so setting up a intranet infrastructure is not possible either.

Answer 3

So, several thoughts here:

1.

I agree with 'erickson', validating that ONLY your app can communicate with the app is nearly impossible with your current design. It's just a matter of time before someone reverse engineer's your app and then its game over (if that's you only form of security). If you want to validate that its your app and a valid user then you need to authenticate the user as well as some mechanism of checking the signature of the app in question (which I don't believe is possible in a client-server model...after all I can always lie and say that my 'hackyou' app has the same signature as your 'realapp' and you can't verify that from the server-side)

2.

Remember the WebBrowser control is essentially a wrapper around IE, so without some tricks (which I'll get to in a sec) you would have to add the cert to the user store.

3.

Here's a hacky way to accomplish what you're asking (even though its a bad idea):

• First use the WebRequest.Create to create a HttpWebRequest object
• Manually load a X509Certificate2 object from either a file or the binary stream encoded in the program
• use the HttpWebRequest.ClientCertificates to add your cert to the webrequest
• Send the request, get the response
• Send the response to the WebBrowser by pushing the ResponseStream of the HttpWebResponse to the DocumentStream of the WebBrowser

This essentially means that you will have to write some wrapper classes to handle the Requests and Responses to and from the Server and are just using the WebBrowser to handling the viewing of the HTML.

In reality, you need to redesign and look at the threats you're trying to handle!

Answer 4

I have a problem with my dynamic Mailing Server Software I have to install it in a very secured environment that made me disable to use my software in that environment