Automated testing with Smart Card authentication (selenium or other option?)

Question

We host hundreds of websites with smart card authentication (CAC authentication for those with DoD experience). I need to build automated tests for these sites. In regular industry, I have used Selenium for end-to-end testing suites, but these websites I must test require smart card authentication.

When a user visits a site, the browser pops-up a window asking which certificate from the smart card to use. This pop-up will prevent me from automating clicks within the DOM, right? Is there a best practice to get around it?

Answer 1

With the recent releases of each Selenium Client handling of pop-ups have become much easier. Using Selenium, you can deal easily with the following kinds of pop-ups:

• Basic Authentication popup (Windows)

• Modal popup (HTML DOM 🌲)

• Alert (JavaScript)

As far as Certificates are concerned we can easily handle them through separate Profiles.