Skip to main content

System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: The profile for the user is a temporary profile

Aaah, security errors, you have to love them. When deploying a new service on IIS, I got the following error:

Server Error in '/SampleService' Application.

clip_image002

The profile for the user is a temporary profile.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException: The profile for the user is a temporary profile.
Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

[CryptographicException: The profile for the user is a temporary profile.]

   System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException.ThrowCryptographicException(Int32 hr) +33

   System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Utils._LoadCertFromFile(String fileName, IntPtr password, UInt32 dwFlags, Boolean persistKeySet, SafeCertContextHandle& pCertCtx) +0

   System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate.LoadCertificateFromFile(String fileName, Object password, X509KeyStorageFlags keyStorageFlags) +218

   System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate..ctor(String fileName, String password, X509KeyStorageFlags keyStorageFlags) +65

   System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate2..ctor(String fileName, String password, X509KeyStorageFlags keyStorageFlags) +61

   CompanyX.Security.Service.Implementation.SecurityTokenServiceConfiguration..ctor() +143

   CompanyX.Security.Service.Implementation.WSTrustServiceHostFactory.CreateServiceHost(String constructorString, Uri[] baseAddresses) +25

   System.ServiceModel.HostingManager.CreateService(String normalizedVirtualPath, EventTraceActivity eventTraceActivity) +1434

   System.ServiceModel.HostingManager.ActivateService(ServiceActivationInfo serviceActivationInfo, EventTraceActivity eventTraceActivity) +52

   System.ServiceModel.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String normalizedVirtualPath, EventTraceActivity eventTraceActivity) +598

[ServiceActivationException: The service '/SampleService/securityservice.svc' cannot be activated due to an exception during compilation.  The exception message is: The profile for the user is a temporary profile..]

   System.Runtime.AsyncResult.End(IAsyncResult result) +489276

   System.ServiceModel.Activation.HostedHttpRequestAsyncResult.End(IAsyncResult result) +178

   System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHttpModule.EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult ar) +350382

   System.Web.AsyncEventExecutionStep.OnAsyncEventCompletion(IAsyncResult ar) +9692321

clip_image002[1]

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.34249

I was able to trace the source of the error to the following line in my code:

var certificate = new X509Certificate2(certificate, password);

This statement fails to work in IIS because the application pool user / IIS user doesn’t have the necessary permissions.  This is because the certificate that I load will be temporarily stored in a certificate store, which by default is the user store. And here rises the problem as the application pool / IIS user does not have rights to that certificate store.

To solve this issue we have to add an extra parameter to the constructor where we specify we want to (temporarily) store the certificate in the machine store:

var certificate = new X509Certificate2(certificate, password, X509KeyStorageFlags.MachineKeySet);

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cache stampede: when our cache turned against us

While investigating some performance issues, we ran into an ASP.NET Core API that cached a fairly expensive aggregation query for 60 seconds. Under normal load, that was fine: one request rebuilds the cache, everyone else reads from it. Under peak load, dozens of requests would arrive in that same expiry window, all see a cache miss, and all fire the same expensive query in parallel. The database didn't like that. That was the moment when our caching layer stopped helping and started hurting. A burst of requests comes in at the same time, all miss the cache, and all go hammer the database or the downstream API at once. That's a cache stampede . The cache was supposed to protect our backend, and for a few hundred milliseconds it did the opposite. Why this happens IMemoryCache.GetOrCreate (and its async sibling) looks like it protects you, but it doesn't add any locking on its own. Look at the naive version: public async Task<Report> GetReportAsync(string key) ...
Read more

A complex system designed from scratch never works

A few years ago, I worked as an architect on a big mainframe rewrite. I still count it as one of my failures. Not because the technology was wrong, but because I couldn't convince the management team to simplify the approach. Years later, the organization is still struggling to get the new system up and running. I left the project at the time, because I couldn't put my name behind an approach that would take very long and cost a lot of money without a working system to show for it along the way. Gall’s Law That memory keeps coming back to me, because it's a textbook case of Gall's Law playing out in real life. Gall's Law , from John Gall's Systemantics , states it plainly: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works, and it cannot be patched to make it work. You have to start over with a simple system that works. What does that mean in practice,...
Read more