Posted by Paul Kehrer on February 22, 2009
Code signing is rapidly becoming an important part of application deployment on many platforms. On OS X it suppresses the keychain warnings when you update your application and on Windows it can bypass numerous UAC notifications as well as the initial application launch dialog. This can (sometimes drastically) improve the customer experience and reduce friction [...]
Posted by Paul Kehrer on January 31, 2009
If you have ever wanted to encrypt a blob of data for transmission or archival, OpenSSL provides a simple way to accomplish this task without resorting to platform specific tools. To encrypt1: openssl enc -e -aes-256-cbc -in filename -out filename.enc To decrypt: openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -in filename.enc -out filename.dec The example above uses AES256 [...]
Posted by Paul Kehrer on January 24, 2009
Sometimes there are cases when you have a separate private key/certificate pair (perhaps with an intermediate or two) that need to be combined into a single file. This merge can be performed on the command line using OpenSSL. openssl pkcs12 -export -in my.cer -inkey my.key -out mycert.pfx This is the most basic use case and [...]
Posted by Paul Kehrer on January 18, 2009
Setting up a basic CA for development certificate issuance via OpenSSL is fairly simple, but most of the tutorials available online don’t show every step. This guide attempts to be as clear as possible, but if you spot anything that could use more explanation don’t hesitate to leave a comment. If you don’t have a [...]