HTTPS and X509 certificates in .NET Part 4: working with certificates in code

Introduction

In the previous post we successfully installed our self-signed CA certificate in the Trusted Root CA folder. We also installed a derived certificate in the Personal certificates folder. We then saw how to make IIS use our certificate for a secured web site.

In this post we’ll start looking into the certificate-related classes in .NET.

Loading a certificate from a file

Digital certificates are represented by the X509Certificate2 class in .NET located in the System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates namespace. The class has numerous overloaded constructors. You can pass in the file path to the certificate, a byte array content, a password etc. Let’s see whether we can load the CA certificate we created before in this series:

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HTTPS and X509 certificates in .NET Part 3: how to install certificates and use them with IIS

Introduction

In the previous post we looked at the command line tools makecert and pvk2pfx. We saw how they could be used to create a root and a derived certificate and to package the private key and certificate files.

In this post we will install the certificates in the Windows certificate store so that they are trusted by IIS. We’ll also see how to tell IIS to use a specific SSL certificate.

certmgr and MMC snap in

The c:\windows\system32 folder includes two GUI tools for certificate management: certmgr.msc and mmc.exe. MMC.exe is a more general tool where you can import so-called snap-ins. Certificates have their own snap-in.

Run mmc.exe as an administrator. The following empty window will open:

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HTTPS and X509 certificates in .NET Part 2: creating self-signed certificates

Introduction

In the previous post we looked at TLS and certificates in general. We saw what makes up an SSL certificate and how browsers use it to verify the identity of the server and to decrypt/encrypt the communication.

In this post we’ll look at a tool called makecert.exe.

Before we actually continue there are some other important terms that we need to investigate.

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