What is visual studio strong name key file

If the utility. Therefore, utility. You will typically find it […]. Remarkable guidance. Upload files to file hosting internet sites to share them with virtually anyone completely free.

Wonderful guidance. Upload files to file hosting sites to share them with someone without cost. But my experience tells it is not. The pfx file is listed in the solution tree.

Build the first solution. Result is that both MyApp. Build the second solution. Copy the hacked MyDLL. Run MyApp — result is expected:. Unhandled Exception: System. Main String[] args. Rebuild the first solution again. Register MyDLL. Remove MyDLL. Use a file manager Total Commander, Servant Salamander, etc. Replace MyDLL. Really this is a good article, which helps a lot for beginners as me as well as developer. Hi, i already assign my assembly using the signing tab in the properties but whenever i execute sgen to generate xml serializer, i always get a message saying the assembly is not signed.

Name required. Mail will not be published required. About C CSharp NET Framework. Tim Toady is the founder of Browserling Inc, a cross-browser testing service. This site contains C information, code, tips and news. Software Development Topics. Jun What is a strong name? Why use strong names? What is a strong name key file?

How do I create a strong name key file for a. NET assembly? Visual Studio makes it easy to create a strong name key file: Select your assembly project in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer.

Click the Properties button. The project properties will appear in the main window. Select the Signing tab: Check the Sign the assembly checkbox. In the Choose a strong name key file drop-down, select New. Typically this is the name of your assembly but can be anything.

Visual Studio will automatically append the proper file extension. If desired, you can protect the strong name key file with a password. To do so, check the Protect my key file with a password checkbox, then enter and confirm the password. Click the OK button. How do I sign an assembly? When you compile your assembly with a strong name key file, the compiler digitally signs the assembly : The compiler calculates the cryptographic digest a hash of your assembly contents.

This is known as the compile-time digest. Modifying just a single byte of your assembly will change this hash value.

The compiler encrypts the digest using the bit private key from your public-private key pair file. The compiler then stores the encrypted digest and public key into the assembly. How does the system verify a signed assembly? Sometime later, when an application attempts to load your signed assembly: The. NET assembly loader calculates the cryptographic digest of the current assembly contents.

This is known as the run-time digest. The loader extracts the stored compile-time digest and public key from the assembly. The loader uses the public key to decrypt the compile-time digest. The loader then compares the run-time digest with the decrypted compile-time digest to ensure they match. If not, then the assembly has been modified since you compiled it, and the assembly load fails. What is delay signing? I tried that before posting, but I forgot to mention it.

What happens if you delete well, better rename :- the SUO file? It seems to be a store for many things -- just one thing to narrow down. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. The password information is stored in your computer's cryptographic storage database. Improve this answer. At first, I could not find any references to what this "cryptographic storage database" is. Since then I found out that I can use sn.

One problem that I'm still having is that Visual Studio seems to generate a random container name for the key, so I don't know how to delete the one associated with my project. You can't use sn. Pretty low level, but I managed to find the key because it was the only one.

I tried this tool called KeyPal, but that no longer seems to work. Thanks for the help so far though : — Thorarin. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Stack Gives Back The same situation is when SNs are used. You can remove SNs from assemblies , but this makes no sense because just as in the case of emails, assemblies without SNs can't be trusted when environment is set up to require those digital signatures or SNs.

This is also related to another very important point in. As in the case of emails, when PKI is setup in a company and security policy is defined that employees can't trust and verify emails which are not signed or where the encrypted hash value is different from hashed plaintext content. The same can be done with. NET Framework using the. NET Configuration tool on each machine or by group policy for large networks.

This tool provides configuration options for. Policy levels work on intersection principle as shown in the figure below. Code groups inside of those policy levels provide permission sets for applications that belong to them according to their evidence origin, publisher, strong name etc.

The assembly will get those permissions based on the intersection of code groups from each policy level applicable to it. This is a very important improvement in security architecture and improves the traditional Windows security model that is process centric see figure below.

NET introduces Code Access Security CAS which is used to identify the origin of code and assign to it specific restrictions and then make security policy more granular and protecting against attacks such as luring attacks. However my intention isn't to describe CAS or Windows security internals I can write about it in other articles but show SN principles. Let's move back to it! Now we can move to the second use for SN - administrators and developers can use SNs together with code groups to provide assemblies with higher permissions not the default ones that assembly will acquire according to default.

NET Framework settings. Let's see an example! I must point out that this is just a simplified example how SN can identify publisher, this is NOT a way to obey CLR security or how to use it in enterprise environment. That is why please try to understand the example as a general principle available with SNs but NOT as a design pattern! Usage of SNs as authentication is a more complex problem and there are many non-trivial issues when SNs are involved.

But it's out of scope of this article, so now back to the sample! Take my sample Windows Forms project and rebuild it and put. Then try to start this application from this share and click on button — what happens? A security exception is raised because application doesn't have enough privileges. Now you have created a new code group containing just your sample application. Now go to your network share and try to start sample application again.

And it works! Because it belongs to our new code group Test with full trust permissions. Try to run it and what happens? It's not working!