How To Import A Client Certificate To Firefox

Overview

Client certificate authentication is very suitable for highly-secure HTTPS connections. But for this type of authentication to work, the server must be configured for it and a client certificate must be loaded unto a client application. In this post, we'll focus on the client side. More specifically, we'll talk about how you can import a client certificate to Firefox.

Step 1

Launch Firefox and click the menu icon (3 horizontal lines) found in the upper-right-corner of the browser. After that, click the Preferences icon.

Step 2

Go to the Certificates tab and then click the View Certificates button.

Step 3

The previous step should have launched the Firefox Certificate Manager. Click the Your Certificates tab and then click the Import button.

Step 4

The previous step should launch a browser which you can use to navigate to the directory where your client certificate file (usually a PKCS12 file with the .p12 or .pfx extension) is stored. Select the file and enter the required password. If you succeed, you should see a notification that says "Successfully restored your security certificate(s) and private key(s)." (or something to that effect. Click OK to proceed.

You should then see your newly imported certificate under the Your Certificates collection of your Firefox Certificate Manager.

That's it! In our next post, I'll show you how to create and export a client certificate on JSCAPE MFT Server as well as enable client certificate authentication for its HTTPS service. Come back for that!

In the meantime, you might also want to read:

10 Essential Attributes of a Secure File Transfer

What Is An SFTP Key?

An Overview of How Digital Certificates Work

Get Started

Care to test drive a managed file transfer server that supports client certificate authentication? Download the free, fully-functional evaluation edition of JSCAPE MFT Server.