Signing a cab file

Question

Hello experts,

Disclaimer: I have no experience in signing the files and this is my first time.

We have a wildcard SSL certificate for our websites. Now we are going to host an ActiveX control on one of our sites. When I try to sign my cab file using that certificate it gives error "private key and the certificate does not match or does not contain valid information". The steps that I performed to sign the cab file are below: 1. I exported the certificate along with the private key to pfx file. 2. I created the pvk file and spc file from pfx file using the instructions given here: http://www.tech-pro.net/export-to-pvk-spc.html 3. I launched signtool signwizard to sign my cab file using the generated pvk and spc files.

I am stuck at this point for last 3 days now and could not seem to find the right answer. I also want to know if our wildcard ssl certificate is good enough to sign files or do I have to purchase a specific certificate for this purpose. When i look at my certificate details by double clicking it, the only purpose mentioned on the certificate is "Ensures the identity of a remote computer". Could this be the reason i am getting error when signing?

Please help me out on this one.

Thanks and Regards, Naveed

Answer 1

You need a code-signing certificate to sign a CAB or EXE file. SSL certificate won't work.

While code-signing and SSL certificates are both X.509 certificates, they have different value of "Key Usage" property.

Most likely the software that performs signing checks key usage and refuses to use the certificate.