Viewing X509 Certificates with .NET
M. Gallant 05/14/2002
.NET provides cryptographic capability, including the ability to load and parse
X509 v3 digital certificates. Unfortunately, the current implementation only supports
reading X509 certificate files in binary DER format (and not the common Base-64 encoded
version). The certinfo.cs C# application demonstrates how to
easily read a certificate file containing either of these formats using try/catch clauses
with the System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException and
System.FormatException exceptions.
Note that the Authenticode native tool certmgr.exe can parse certificate file (stores) in
any of the formats exportable by the cryptoAPI GUI certificate manager in win32:
- DER encoded binary X.509
- Base-64 encoded X.509
- Cryptographic Message Syntax Standard - PKCS #7 Certs
certinfo.cs
Michel I. Gallant
neutron@istar.ca