ASP.NET

If you have an ASP.NET MVC application in production that uses IdentityServer, you may soon find yourself in its codebase due to the upcoming SameSite cookie changes spearheaded by Google.

While you’re in there messing with the code, why don’t you give your old application a freshen up and update your OpenID Connect usage to take advantage of some of the features of the newer OWIN libraries and the latest security recommendations of authorization code plus PKCE?

While playing around with IdentityServer4 and mTLS client authentication, I was recommended mkcert for generating trusted development certificates. I found this tool to be super simple to use and it saved me from having to use OpenSSL or the PowerShell replacement for MakeCert (New-SelfSignedCertificate).

So, I thought I would document how to use mkcert on Windows and how to use it for some ASP.NET Core development tasks such as client authentication and pfx generation.