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c#certificatewin-universal-appssl-certificate

Public Key from Certificate in C# Universal App Platform


In this article https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/10/13/create-more-secure-apps-with-less-effort-10-by-10/ they explain you how to securely connect to a server. They check the thumbprint to see that the cert is legitimate. But the certificates change over time and the hardcoded string I check against will be no longer valid.

That's why I want to extract the public key. Because I'm certain it's not gonna change from one certificate to other.

In this code:

        private async Task DemoSSLRoot()
    {
        // Send a get request to Bing
        HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
        Uri bingUri = new Uri("https://www.bing.com");
        HttpResponseMessage response = await client.GetAsync(bingUri);

        // Get the list of certificates that were used to validate the server's identity
        IReadOnlyList<Certificate> serverCertificates = response.RequestMessage.TransportInformation.ServerIntermediateCertificates;

        // Perform validation
        if (!ValidCertificates(serverCertificates))
        {
            // Close connection as chain is not valid
            return;
        }

        PrintResults("Validation passed\n");
        // Validation passed, continue with connection to service
    }

    private bool ValidCertificates(IReadOnlyList<Certificate> certs)
    {
        // In this example, we iterate through the certificates and check that the chain contains
        // one specific certificate we are expecting
        for (int i = 0; i < certs.Count; i++)
        {
            PrintResults("Cert# " + i + ": " + certs[i].Subject + "\n");
            byte[] thumbprint = certs[i].GetHashValue();

            // Check if the thumbprint matches whatever you are expecting
            // ‎d4 de 20 d0 5e 66 fc 53 fe 1a 50 88 2c 78 db 28 52 ca e4 74
            byte[] expected = new byte[] { 212, 222, 32, 208, 94, 102, 252, 83, 254, 26, 80, 136, 44, 120, 219, 40, 82, 202, 228, 116 };

            if (ThumbprintMatches(thumbprint, expected))
            {
                return true;
            }
        }

        return false;
    }

Read more at https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2015/10/13/create-more-secure-apps-with-less-effort-10-by-10/#1tFDZeMtskOkOrvd.99

It's quite easy to access the thumbprint. But I need the public key. I was searching in internet and I found really crazy code to check that I was not able to make it work.

Can somebody tell me if there is an easy way to extract the public key from a Certificate in Windows 10?

Regards.


Solution

  • As Tomas said there was a method called GetPublicKey. It is not included in the APIs. Just noticed there was a nuget package called "System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates" where this method was available.

    Thanks!