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i am doing some changes to an application that had a very strange authentication system. for some reason the previous developer has a system where after the user/pass is authenticated, it generates a self-signed ssl certificate specifically for that user and tries to configure the client browser to use that certificate.

yes, that means if 100 people are on the server at once, the server is maintaining a different ssl cert for each user. obviously this isnt working very well.

i am getting authorization to strip this system out and simply deploy the app on a server with a certificate. my question is i have 3 years of users that have these self signed certificates installed on their browsers. if i move this to another server with a standard certificate am i going to run into any problems with these existing users?

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Are you talking about self-signed certificates generated to be used as client certificate (it doesn't seem to make any sense to generate a new server self-signed certificate every time a user logs on)? What would this have to do with a change of server certificate, then? – Bruno Dec 9 '11 at 18:11
im eliminating the system that generates a new cert for each user. my question is if i have existing clients with these certs installed on their browsers, is eliminating this system and moving to a standard 3rd party cert, will i have problems with these existing clients. – scphantm Dec 9 '11 at 19:03
Are you moving to 3rd part cert, one for each user (client certificates), or simply changing the server certificate? – Bruno Dec 9 '11 at 19:22

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The only way I can see that being an issue is if the users have something that's tracking which cert is on which site. If you just purchase a good third party CA cert that's trusted by your users, they shouldn't see any change in the site once it's switched out.

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