switched our IdP to a new signing key yesterday and now Genesys is rejecting all SAML assertions with a signature mismatch error. checked the trust settings in Admin > Security, keys look valid, but users are getting bounced to the generic login screen. anyone see this behavior after a cert rotation?
Think of the SAML trust settings like a locked door. You changed the key on the outside (the IdP) but haven’t updated the lock inside (Genesys). Even if the keys look valid in the UI, the system might still be holding onto the old public certificate hash. Go to Admin > Security > Identity Providers and re-upload the X.509 certificate from your new provider. Don’t just edit the metadata. Replace the whole thing.
Clear your browser cache too. Sometimes the old session ticket sticks around and causes weird loops. If that doesn’t fix it, check the logs for the specific error code. It usually points to a clock skew issue if the time on the IdP server is more than five minutes off from Genesys. Sync those clocks first.
The UI update is a good start, but if you’re running a webhook-based auth flow or custom middleware, the cached cert might still be in memory. Genesys caches the public key for signature verification to avoid hitting the IDP on every request. You need to force a refresh of the trust chain.
Here’s how I handle it in my Node.js middleware when this happens. I call the internal admin API to invalidate the cache, or just restart the consumer if it’s a local process.
const { platformClient } = require('@genesyscloud/genesyscloud');
async function refreshSamlTrust() {
const auth = platformClient.AuthApi();
await auth.loginClientCredentials({
client_id: process.env.GC_CLIENT_ID,
client_secret: process.env.GC_CLIENT_SECRET,
grant_type: 'client_credentials',
scope: ['admin:identityprovider:write']
});
// Force metadata refresh
await platformClient.IdentityProviderApi().putIdentityprovider({
identityproviderId: 'your-idp-id',
body: {
// re-send the full config to trigger re-parse
metadataUrl: 'https://your-idp.com/metadata'
}
});
}
Don’t forget to check the audienceRestriction claim in the SAML payload too. If the IdP rotated keys, they might have changed the entity ID. That breaks validation even if the sig is perfect.
Be careful with that cache invalidation approach. While restarting the service works for a moment, it doesn’t fix the underlying trust chain if your client application is still holding onto the old metadata. I ran into this exact scenario last month during a provider . The issue wasn’t just the server-side cache. It was the embedded client app SDK initialization.
If you are using the genesyscloud-webmessenger or a custom embeddable client, the SDK fetches the SAML metadata and caches the public key in the browser’s local storage or IndexedDB. Even after you update the Admin console, the client won’t re-fetch the new certificate until the cache expires or is manually cleared. This causes a silent failure where the assertion is signed with the new key, but the client validates against the old one.
You need to force a metadata refresh in your initialization code. Here is how I handle it in the client setup:
const client = new PureCloudPlatformClientV2();
client.setOAuthClient({
clientId: 'your-client-id',
redirectUri: 'your-redirect-uri',
// Force re-fetch of SAML metadata
fetchMetadata: true
});
// Optional: Clear local storage if stuck
localStorage.removeItem('genesys:saml:metadata');
This ensures the SDK pulls the latest X.509 certificate from the Genesys endpoint before attempting the signature validation. If you skip this step, users will continue to see the generic login screen even after the admin settings are correct. The fetchMetadata flag is the key here. It bypasses the stale cache.
Also, check the clock skew on your IdP. If the new certificate has a slightly different issue with time synchronization, the assertion might be rejected before the signature check even happens. Genesys allows a 5-minute skew by default. If your provider’s clock is off by more than that, you’ll get a different error, but it looks similar in the logs.
Make sure to test with an incognito window. Regular browsers hold onto those tokens aggressively.