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Friday, March 14, 2014

You have chosen not to trust... - Citrix Receiver certificates for Mac

My work has a Citrix desktop meaning I can log in remotely to it using Citrix Receiver for Mac and a web browser. I recently tried to do this from my Mac (having used a Windows laptop previously with no issues) but came up against a curious error message:

"You not chosen to trust Thwaite Authority, the issuer of this servers certificate"

Really? Have I? Didn't remember not trusting anything... So off to Google I went. I found out the answer in a post on the Apple Communities from MacManiac_ which I thought I would outline here for reference.

The basic issue seems to be that Windows can navigate into the Citrix farm and get it's own certificate. The Mac cannot, without being given it explicitly. But the good news is you can copy the certificate from a Windows machine to a Mac and it will work. So you will need a Windows PC and this is how it goes:

Windows Machine Instructions:

1) From a Windows computer, log in to the Citrix Gateway once and launch any application.     This will ensure that the certificate gets installed in Windows, if it’s not already present.
2) In Windows, log out of the Citrix gateway.
3) launch Internet Explorer if not already running.
4) in IE, go to the Tools menu –> Internet Options –> Content tab
5) click the Certificates button
6) click the Intermediate Certification Authorities tab
7) find the “xxx Authority” certificate in the list (where "xxx" is the name in the certificate error from Citrix Receiver on your Mac - in my case - Thwaite Authority)
8) click the certificate once to highlight, then click Export
9) click Next
10) choose DER Encoded Binary X.509 (.CER)
11) click Next
12) click Browse, and change to the Desktop if not there already
13) in the file name field, type or paste: Network Solutions Certificate Authority
14) click Save, click Next, click Finish.
15) there should now be a file on the Windows desktop with the name
       Network Solutions Certificate Authority.cer
16) copy this file to the Mac in whatever way you normally move files.

Mac Machine Instructions:

17) on the Mac, copy the file to your desktop.
18) in Finder, go to Applications –> Utilities
19) launch Keychain Access
20) open the System keychain and import the certificate
21) restart your Macintosh and then try to access your Citrix Gateway again

This is reproduced from that post from MacManiac_ so a big shout out to him/her. This works like a charm and I was logged in and working in no time!

NOTE - I am using Windows 7 and Mac OSX 10.8.5 but I suspect it's broadly similar across operating system versions


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