Whether to sign a document or for an authentication process, for Viafirma it doesn’t matter where the digital certificate is located. For the “foreground” operations, that is to say, those with which the end user must interact (employee sitting at his PC, for example), our desktop application is in charge of retrieving the certificate. And it will do it with these criteria:
- Search the certificate store of the O.S. (Windows, Linux and Mac).
- Searches the browser’s own certificate store (in some cases the browser does not have or shares it with the O.S.’s own store, as is the case with Internet Exporer/Windows and Safari/macOS).
- And finally, it looks for external certificate stores connected to the PC, such as a token or a smart card [1].
[1] Not to be confused with a traditional USB where we could have copied our .p12/.pfx. For all intents and purposes, that is a storage drive and not a secure device storage drive (PKCS#11).