TLS connectivity in NodeJS using certificate and key from Certificate store

Question

I have implemented TLS connectivity through MQTT as shown below.

mqttOptions = {
clientId: '100',
key: fs.readFileSync('test/certs/client.key'),
cert: fs.readFileSync('test/certs/client.crt'),
ca: fs.readFileSync('test/certs/ca.crt'),
secureProtocol: 'TLSv1_method',
rejectUnauthorized: false,
protocolId: 'MQIsdp',
protocolVersion: 3,
passphrase: 'edgenode',
keepAlive: 1000,
clean: false,
reconnectPeriod: '1000',
will: willMessage

};

var client = mqtt.connect(tls://localhost:8883, mqttOptions);

Here I'm passing in the client key, certificate and the CA certificate. Instead I need to connect using information from Windows certificate store. Assuming I have installed the client certificate in Windows Certificate Store, how can I read the private key from it using nodeJS and establish connectivity? Please advice.

Answer 1

Access to the Windows Keystore is via the MSCAPI.

I can't see any NodeJS wrappers for this API on npm but even if there were you would have to modify the mqtt library to work with it as it won't actually give you access to the private client keys, but instead you pass in data to be signed/encrypted using that key and it gives you back the signed/encrypted data like a hardware crypto device.

If you really need to use the Windows keystore I would suggest porting the client app to something like C, C# or Java as there are MSCAPI libraries for these that present the keys/certs using the language standard APIs