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How to get rid of the smartcard popup when interacting with LDAP over SSL

In one of our applications we are connecting with LDAP through System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement.. This code worked fine for years until we had to make the switch from LDAP to LDAPS and incorporate SSL in our connections.

Let me start by showing you the original code (or at least a part of it):

We thought that making the switch to SSL would be easy. We therefore added the ContextOptions.SecureSocketLayer to the ContextOptions enum;

However after doing that, we get a SmartCard popup everytime this code is called:

I couldn’t find a good solution to fix it while keeping the PrincipalContext class. After some help of GitHub Copilot and some research I discovered that I could get it working when I switched to the underlying LdapConnection and explicitly setting the ClientCertificate to null:

More information

c# - PrincipalContext with smartcard inserted - Stack Overflow

c# - How to validate server SSL certificate for LDAP+SSL connection - Stack Overflow

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