Client Certificate Rejected, repeatedly +with great vigor

Question

Hi all --
Perhaps you can give me a hand. I recently got a new Macbook Pro -- my first new CPU since the ole' clamshell back in 2001. Very happy with it as a whole but also finding that I am a bit behind the times in terms of my understanding of the software. Here is the problem: Yesterday I tried to access a page using Safari (2.0.3) from my history. I do not believe that it was a secure page as it was part of the dartmouth.edu website but it may have been. Anyway, a dialouge box popped up asking for my to use FileVaultMaster keychain. I did not know that I had such a thing but I typed in my master password. The page still did not open, but Safari displayed a text box saying that there was an error -- this particular error, in fact:
<begin quote>
The error was: “client certificate rejected” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1205) Please choose Report Bug to Apple from the Safari menu, note the error number, and describe what you did before you saw this message
<end of quote>
Now, when I try to access the basic Dartmouth homepage of http://www.dartmouth.edu, Safari converts it automatically to https://www.dartmouth.edu and asks for the keychain and then displays the error. I tried emptying the cache and resetting Safari (and even restarting the computer, although I understand that that is no longer necessairy with OS X) but to no avail. Can anyone clue me as to what is happening, and why?
Thanks much in advance,
-Sparco03
MacBook Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.5)  

Answer 1

I emailed [email protected] about this problem and here is the response. The solution of getting a valid Dartmouth certificate doesn't apply to non Dartmouth users, so I'm not sure what to do in that case.
"You need to check your Keychain. The reason you are getting that error is because Safari is sending a Client Certificate back to the web server (which asked for it), but the web server can't verify that it's a good certificate. This usually happens when you have an expired certificate, or you have a non-Dartmouth certificate that Safari is likely sending because it can't find a Dartmouth one."
"Whichever of these is the case, the solution is to get a valid Dartmouth certificate, which you can generate by going to https://collegeca.dartmouth.edu/ and following the directions on the web page. If you have an expired Dartmouth cert, you will need to delete that before you import your new, valid certificate."
"The reason all of this is happening is specific to Intel Macs. The mechanism that Dartmouth has used, better than 7+ years, to authenticate browser users to web site (Kerberos) uses the SideCar helper application. This application doesn't run on Intel Macs, and it most likely never will. Fortunately, Dartmouth installed client certificates as an additional/alternate solution for web site authentication a few years ago. Since client certs work great on Intel Macs, we had to force Intel Macs to always use HTTPS when connecting to any site on www.dartmouth.edu. That way we can always be able to ask for your client cert, so that we don't break your ability to access protected sites that live on the www.dartmouth.edu server."