如何为程序临时添加/信任证书颁发机构？

Question

Our program needs to work with a third party certificate that was provided by a partner. This certificate requires we install a certificate authority that was also provided to us before connecting to the client server. Essentially we have to work with a self signed certificate.

The application is written in C#. I could just instruct end users on how to install a certificate authority before running our application but ideally I'd like to just temporarily add/trust the certificate authority .pfx file and embed that file as a resource in the .exe.

Does anybody have an idea?

Answer 1

My first thought (as mentioned in the comments) would be to use Process.Start() inside of a #if DEBUG conditional compilation (or use your own custom variable) to run certutil. See this article for how to install the third party CA with certutil: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/295663

To import a CA certificate into the Enterprise NTAuth store, follow these steps: Export the certificate of the CA to a .cer file. The following file formats are supported: DER encoded binary X.509 (.cer) Base-64 encoded X.509 (.cer) At a command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER: certutil -dspublish -f filename NTAuthCA

Process.Start() documentation:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.diagnostics.process.start(v=vs.110).aspx

You could also just write a bacth file to install and uninstall and include it in your source control or project with a readme.