Why is nobody using SSL Client Certificates?
I'm the author of this, now quite dated, article and by now I really don't agree with its contents any more - at least not fully:<p>1) this is not truly two-factor authentication as the certificate is stored right there on the machine I'm using for authentication. If this would ever get widespread use, we'd have issues with malware extracting the key from the browser. Not even password-protecting the key (giving you something comparable to SSH authentication) would help much as malware presumably has access to your memory anyways.<p>2) With the problems inherent to the SSL protocol in conjunction with renegotiation (<a href="http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/120541" rel="nofollow">http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/120541</a>), this becomes a bit annoying because you can't safely have resources for which you check a client certificate on the same server as resources where you don't. Remember: The article predates the vulnerability by a year.<p>3) More and more people are beginning to have multiple devices they use. There's not even a "main" machine any more. Not having access to the client-side certificate is annoying though with the various browser syncing solutions out there, this might become a non-issue over time.<p>None the less. My personal complaint about the overly complicated UI still stands - heck, this is even annoying for me and I would (aside of point 2 above) have good use for this at times - but clicking through this jungle of dialog boxes remains annoying to this date.