Developing Secure Applications with Visual Basic

Building a Signing Utility

To see how these functions work in practice, you'll build a little utility that signs and verifies messages. It will also encrypt signed messages, along with decrypting them, all using the high-level functions you've looked at in this chapter.

To perform these tasks, this application will need to be able to retrieve either the Signature or the Key Exchange certificates from the certificate store and use them to sign and encrypt messages.

Creating the Project

To start this project, create a new, standard EXE project in Visual Basic. Copy the crypto class from the preceding chapter's sample application into the project directory, and include it in your new project. Edit the declaration section of the crypto ...