CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#silverlightwindows-phone
Joe Borg
Joe Borg

Reputation: 885

Silverlight - Hardcoding private key

If I hardcode a private key in a Windows Phone application, can people extract it once the application is released to the public on the Windows Store?

I am asking this because I have found no way of accessing installed certificates from the phone.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 152

Answers (1)

sircodesalot
sircodesalot

Reputation: 11439

Obviously I don't know the specific details of what you're trying to do, but I will say that putting sensitive information like passwords or private keys and the like into your application is almost always a bad idea. As fantastically productive .net is, it's also extremely easy to reverse engineer (in fact many, many advanced developers reverse programs just to improve their own skills). A cryptographic schema is typically only as strong as the key is secure. If someone were to determine the key on one phone, it sounds like they would have access to the key on all phones, which is kind of a problem.

It would be better to store this information remotely and have the user authenticate before they can access their private key (or whatever other secure information you're trying to store).

Upvotes: 1

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