Archive for the ‘Cryptography’ Category

The Demise of CAPICOM

Wednesday, October 15th, 2008

CAPICOM, a COM-based wrapper for the CryptoAPI library, is deprecated and on its way out. However, Microsoft has no time line for phasing it out, nor have they provided sufficient documentation of alternatives. Many CAPICOM pages contain a confusing, bright-red header along the lines of: [The SignedCode object is available for ...

GnuPG Plugin for vim Under Cygwin

Saturday, October 4th, 2008

GnuPG, GNU Privacy Guard, is a free system for encrypting files, emails, etc. The GnuPG plugin for vim provides automatic encryption and decryption of files within vim. If you attempt to edit a GnuPG-encrypted file with vim, it will prompt you for the password, and re-encrypt the file ...

Using Certificates and Signtool

Friday, September 12th, 2008

Obtain a Software Publisher Certificate Your Certificate Authority will supply one of the following: a Personal Information Exchange (.pfx) file a Software Publisher Certificate (.spc), and a Private Key (.pvk) file a CER-encoded X.509 Certificate (.cer), and a Private Key (.pvk) file For the second and third case, these file must be converted to a ...

mssign32.dll

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

With CAPICOM deprecated, MSDN suggests using the mssign32.dll functions. There are two fundamental problems with this: No example code whatsoever is provided. No header file is provided. Well, at least I can do something about #2. Here is a minimal version of a header file for mssign32.dll. It includes direct ...

SSH Key Generation and Conversion With OpenSSH

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Key Generation Generate a DSA key: ssh-keygen -t dsa This will generate an RFC 4716-formatted key file similar to the following: -----BEGIN DSA PRIVATE KEY----- MIIBuwIBAAKBgQDijfpmyXBZpnq8EhEhSxeJz7fNxIlWYD6t7bviDZMARh8mLCr2 bug2J1K+Rl4qoLQJ7zRGlytwQ2krTCmvVahOjy9m/QW5936rCyVS19PRdJMEEMSN vLQaMtpKbnHp0z8Xs/X1CkDmxThOlvRVjiObdd0U9eELLoo5VHauVHmufwIVAO7j l4bxgVXeX09WJcyOXAUauNXHAoGAF20ESXgTvbbdxDECa2tfTi/j1/+emNV/+zuR aq6xms/K0piZhMlkK3BD9PgHhXfqZuRT/Z9b8ja3nR34H2KL3UInCNV6kSq6h+MD MLJnNQG4wADLYw3p5Tzz/hUwtfqpZ/9e7FpBdgfooS274GgPKTG8BFRiudIztPpK 4GueicoCgYEAy8hllDrFzQUqFG0kMe8r3dOFDjMQHf6ITttmAiScwEPg+a5D++Sq bj42vkKSNgaYHc+Z8QPgerPehIkBde6wx0ukq0a8IXy8F86IasXz3wzotPeJsdKi mynQKzhSm9Jzbk/SK/yh5NGhJzz1VmHsg+ir/qReguMHfqDGCI4kSFYCFDJKXQ4h MteJHSlu62RrGwInRBOh -----END DSA PRIVATE KEY----- An accompanying, OpenSSH-formatted public key file should also be generated under the same file name with a .pub suffix. It should appear similar to the following: ssh-dss ...