OPDA Certificate

Question

What is OPDA Certificate?

Because during installation of unsigned symbian apps, it gives an error.

"unable to install a protected app from an unknown supplier"

So what does this certificate contains actually?????

And after signing the application with this OPDA certificate and the key, the application works....

Answer 1

"unable to install a protected app from an unknown supplier"

This error comes if any of the following is true:

• Self-signed installation package uses package UID from protected range ( < 0x80000000 ).
• Self-signed installation package has EXE that uses SID from protected range ( < 0x80000000 ).
• Self-signed installation package has EXE/DLL that has non-zero VID (VendorID).

http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/S60_SW_installer_troubleshooting

I didn't know about OPDA but but it seems to be a Chinese site offering some kind of IMEI-bound developer certificates.

Self-signed means that you just have generated key and cert pair yourself but the cert is not signed by any certificate authority. Therefore the Symbian OS platform security mechanism prevents the installation package to do anything "dangerous", for example only a handful of platsec capabilities can be issued and there's this restricion on UID/SID/VID. On the other hand, a developer certificate validates to some CA root and it can be used to sign packages with much larger set of capabilities and without these UID/SID/VID restrictions.