alt Hacker NewsHere it attempts to read my personal certificate that sits in the browser that I use for filling my taxes and do government stuff, suspicious indeed.
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That's because the client certificate interface in browsers is supremely dumb. It always just lists all certificates you have, with very little context in the UI, and hopes that's good enough. I believe that's part of the reason client certificates are not poplar; having actual users deal with that is terrible, and the browsers (in practice, Chrome because of its overwhelming market share) isn't incentivized to fix it.
That's literally how client certificates work.
It's not attempting to "read" anything, nor is it the least bit suspicious or malicious.
Your browser was asked if it would like to present a certificate to authenticate, and you were prompted to choose one if you please. You can also hit cancel as client auth can be optional and the server will either serve you the page or a 401/403.
It's like being asked to show ID to enter a pub, you can either show one or decline, and they may or may not let you enter based on that transaction.
That’s likely just the side effect of supporting mtls. Mutual TLS came around at the same time as Microsoft did implicit network auth. Seemed magical at the time and so hare brained for eons of problems. The user side tls never caught on in most circles and still has the ancient sharp edges