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Specification of HTML5 resurrects Netscape's concept of <keygen> tag used to securely generate pair of keys.

It seems that the tag has been quite well adopted by the browser vendors. It is supported by FireFox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. As usually with web standards there is one black sheep that doesn't support the tag and can you guess which browser is it? Yes, it is Microsoft Internet Explorer!

I'd like to use the <keygen> tag in one of my projects, but I need to have similar functionality implemented for MSIE. I was wondering if there is any JavaScript or ActiveX way of implementing the functionality of:

  1. generation of pair of keys
  2. request for public key signing on the server-side
  3. finally installation of the pair in the browser's key chain.
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Maybe this article helps you (at least regarding MSs motives not to include the <keygen> tag in IE)?

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@Kooilnc: This is useful explanation. And I clearly can see Microsoft point. I find <keygen> very useful concept, but the implementation is quite bad. Lack of full PKCS#10 syntax compatibility requires server-side boiler-plate code. –  Tomasz Blachowicz May 30 '11 at 12:33
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It's rather late to answer this, but the IE alternatives are the Certificate Enrollment APIs.
Beware that there are two different versions: XEnroll (XP) and CertEnroll (Vista, 7).

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