Delphi for .NET Developer’s Guide

Strong Naming Assemblies

Strong naming an assembly is a process whereby public key encryption is added to the assembly. A strong name doesn’t actually make any assurances about the trustworthiness of the assembly, but it is instead a vehicle to help to verify name uniqueness, prevent name spoofing, and provide callers with some identity when a reference is resolved.

Note

Any assembly you ship to the public should be strong named.

The process of strong naming involves generating a key pair and then using that key pair in the assembly attributes.

To create a key pair, use the sn.exe utility from the Microsoft .NET SDK with the –k switch:

sn –k newkeypair.snk

Then pass this filename to the AssemblyKeyFile attribute in the package file:

[assembly: ...