Developing Secure Applications with Visual Basic

Signing Messages and Verifying Signatures

At this point, you already know how to perform all the necessary steps in creating a digital signature on your own. You know how to create a hash of an object and then how to encrypt that hash using an encryption key. What you don't know how to do is format the various pieces of information that make up a digital signature into a single object. Here, the process can get a little hairy.

The good news is that this process doesn't have to be as complicated as what you already know how to do. You can use a series of "simplified" functions that perform these tasks with a minimum of code. These functions not only create the digital signature with a single function call, but they also format the signature in ...