X509Certificate2 makes IIS crash

Question

When newing up an instance of X509Certificate2(string, string) my IIS process simply crashes. No .Net exception, no nothing, except of this in my event log

Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 8.0.9200.16384, time stamp: 0x50108835 Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.2.9200.16420, time stamp: 0x505ab405 Exception code: 0xc0000374 Fault offset: 0x00000000000ea485 Faulting process id: 0x102c Faulting application start time: 0x01ce10301e250c4d Faulting application path: c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\w3wp.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll Report Id: 5e55321c-7c23-11e2-93f9-00155d8a0f17 Faulting package full name:  

Im pretty stunned and don't know where to start looking. When attaching a debugger to the process, i'm able to break unto this line, but when stepping over it the the whole thing crashes.

_certificate = new X509Certificate2(pfxFile, pfxPassword); 

pfxFile is a valid path, if i change it i immediately get a correct .Net PathNotFound exception.

Server is Windows 2012, running IIS8 and .Net 4.5.

Update
This article describes the same problem where a solution is to make sure the App Pool identity has LoadUserProfile enabled.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem, also on Windows Server 2012, which crashed IIS, when using

new X509Certificate2(fileName, keyPassword, X509KeyStorageFlags.Exportable) 

This was fixed by changing the constructor to

new X509Certificate2(fileName, keyPassword, X509KeyStorageFlags.MachineKeySet | X509KeyStorageFlags.PersistKeySet | X509KeyStorageFlags.Exportable)