How to sign installation files of a Visual Studio .msi

Posted by Alex on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Alex
Published on 2009-10-30T21:00:38Z Indexed on 2010/04/02 5:13 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 561

Filed under:

authenticode

|

c#

|

visual-studio-2008

|

code-signing-certificate

This may be a duplicate, though I can't find it at this time. If so please point me in the right direction.

I recently purchased an authenticode certificate from globalsign and am having problems signing my files for deployment. There are a couple of .exe files that are generated by a project and then put into a .msi. When I sign the .exe files with the signtool the certificate is valid and they run fine. The problem is that when I build the .msi (using the visual studio setup project) the .exe files loose their signatures. So I can sign the .msi after it is built, but the installed .exe files continue the whole "unknown publisher" business. How can I retain the signature on these files for installation on the client machine?

You help is appreciated.

-Alex

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about authenticode

Get timestamp from Authenticode Signed files in .NET

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
We need to verify that binary files are signed properly with digital signature (Authenticode). This can be achieved with signtool.exe pretty easily. However, we need an automatic way that also verifies signer name and timestamp. This is doable in native C++ with CryptQueryObject() API as shown in… >>> More
Find out if assembly is signed with Authenticode

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I use an assembly of a 3rd party vendor. In an older version this assembly used authenticode. This caused the assembly loading to last quiet long. The developer of the vendor told me that the new version is not signed with authenticode. How can I check if this is true. On my development machine the… >>> More
Verify Authenticode signature as being from our company for automatic updater

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I am implementing an automatic update feature and need some advice on how to do this securely using best practices. I would like to use the downloaded file's Authenticode signature to verify that it is safe to run (i.e. originates from our company and hasn't been tampered with). My question is very… >>> More
Possible to use Authenticode to sign/verify proprietary file formats?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Is it possible to use an Authenticode signing certificate to sign and validate proprietary file formats? Over time I've seen the Authenticode format extended to support VBA. JAR files, and even Open Office files so I'm thinking that it may be extensible to other file formats. Malcolm >>> More
How to sign installation files of a Visual Studio .msi

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
This may be a duplicate, though I can't find it at this time. If so please point me in the right direction. I recently purchased an authenticode certificate from globalsign and am having problems signing my files for deployment. There are a couple of .exe files that are generated by a project and… >>> More

Related posts about c#

.NET WebRequest.PreAuthenticate not quite what it sounds like

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve run into the problem a few times now: How to pre-authenticate .NET WebRequest calls doing an HTTP call to the server – essentially send authentication credentials on the very first request instead of waiting for a server challenge first? At first glance this sound like it should be easy:… >>> More
HttpWebRequest and Ignoring SSL Certificate Errors

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Man I can't believe this. I'm still mucking around with OFX servers and it drives me absolutely crazy how some these servers are just so unbelievably misconfigured. I've recently hit three different 3 major brokerages which fail HTTP validation with bad or corrupt certificates at least according to… >>> More
The dynamic Type in C# Simplifies COM Member Access from Visual FoxPro

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
I’ve written quite a bit about Visual FoxPro interoperating with .NET in the past both for ASP.NET interacting with Visual FoxPro COM objects as well as Visual FoxPro calling into .NET code via COM Interop. COM Interop with Visual FoxPro has a number of problems but one of them at least got a lot… >>> More
Dynamic Type to do away with Reflection

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
The dynamic type in C# 4.0 is a welcome addition to the language. One thing I’ve been doing a lot with it is to remove explicit Reflection code that’s often necessary when you ‘dynamically’ need to walk and object hierarchy. In the past I’ve had a number of ReflectionUtils that used string based expressions… >>> More
Finding a Relative Path in .NET

as seen on West-Wind - Search for 'West-Wind'
Here’s a nice and simple path utility that I’ve needed in a number of applications: I need to find a relative path based on a base path. So if I’m working in a folder called c:\temp\templates\ and I want to find a relative path for c:\temp\templates\subdir\test.txt I want to receive back subdir\test… >>> More