Is it possible to generate a SSL certificate in the browser?
javascript, ssl
Solution
You can't really generate a certificate in the browser, but you can generate a certificate request (or equivalent) in the browser: the key-pair is generated within the browser and the private key never leaves it.
(Note that if you generated a certificate directly within the browser, it would at best be self-signed, since the CA wouldn't give you its private key. That's why you only get to have a certificate-request, since there's little demand for generating self-signed certificates. I think there's a Firefox extension that could do it, though.)
The certificate request is sent to the server, but the format depends on the browser and the method used. What you'll get on the server side is the public key, it's up to the service you implement to turn it into a certificate (unless you use an existing service of course). You can find more details about this in this answer.
Once the certificate is generated on the server, it can be re-imported back to be associated with the private key.
Problem
For an administration interface we want to implement client authentication with SSL. The idea is that during the registration process every user generates a SSL certificate, which is registered in the browser and used for authenticating the client to the server. It is important that the private key never leaves the client. Hence it is no solution to generate the certificate on the server and send it to the client. Is it possible to generate a SSL cert in the browser (e.g. IE 9+, Firefox 12+, Chrome) using JavaScript? Is it possible to register a certificate?