shahine.com/omar/

Frankly, I've been embarrassed for years that all my little freeware applications display a scary security warning when anyone installs them. This is because they are not authenticode signed.

I never bothered to go get a certificate to do so cause they cost about $200 a year. Well I have enough people downloading (and donating!) Send to SmugMug that I finally thought it was time to do something about this. The SmugMug folks have been kind enough to feature my downloader on their page for over a year now so I figured it was high time to stop scaring people.

Well Eric Lawrence (creator of Fiddler and SlickRun) clued me in to Tuows who offers Authenticode Digital Signatures for about $80 a year. So I bit the bullet. The process of getting a cert and signing your msi is pretty easy:

1. Create an account at Tucows
2. Buy a Cert
3. Email them your Drivers License
4. Download the Cert
5. Export your certificate from the machine and store in a safe place
6. Grab signtool.exe from the .NET 2.0 SDK
7. Sign your binary using the certificate from step 4

Voila.

The nice thing about a Certificate is now I can sign anything I distribute including Excel Spreadsheets with Macros to prevent them from working properly.

So if you are a freeware author, for $80 bucks a year you can save your users some grief.

I used the following tutorial to help out.