I have written an application (in C#) to communicate with one of our customers via a web service. Our customer requires us to use bi-directional SSL. The customer has sent us their certificate (in the form of a .p7b file). The client certificate was provided to me in the form of a .cer file.
I've installed the certificates and in the program I use the HttpWebRequest class and add the client certificate to the ClientCertificates collection.
When I run the program I get an exception:
System.Net.WebException: The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.
I have used WireShark to try to diagnose the error and I see this (IP Addresses redacted):
1615 12.259771000 CLIENT_IP SERVER_IP SSLv3 112 Client Hello
1629 12.429299000 SERVER_IP CLIENT_IP SSLv3 1488 Server Hello, Certificate, Certificate Request, Server Hello Done
1630 12.445672000 CLIENT_IP SERVER_IP SSLv3 397 Alert (Level: Warning, Description: No Certificate), Client Key Exchange, Change Cipher Spec, Encrypted Handshake Message
1645 12.666191000 SERVER_IP CLIENT_IP SSLv3 61 Alert (Level: Fatal, Description: Handshake Failure)
It seems the server has sent their certificate, but for some reason, my app is not sending one back, so it sends the No Certificate alert. However, in my code, it seems to find the certificate and it is added to the ClientCertificate collection of the HttpWebRequest class. Since I fairly new to SSL, I am not sure where the problem lies? It could be a programming mistake, but using some test certficates seemed to work. Does the alert indicate that there is a problem with the client certificate? Some posts that I have read seem to indicate that although the private key is not sent to the server, it is still needed on the client side. But after loading the certificate (using the .Net X509Certificate2 class), I notice that the PrivateKey property is null. Could this be the source of the problem? The .cer file was provided to me by someone else in the company.
Any assistance or suggestions would be helpful. I have refrained from posting code as I'm not sure it's welcome here, but I can post some if need be.