What is delay signing?

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What is delay signing?..

Answer / guest

Delay signing allows to place a shared assembly in the GAC
by signing the assembly with just the public key. This
allows the assembly to be signed with the private key at a
later stage, when the development process is complete and
the component or assembly is ready to be deployed.

This process enables developers to work with shared
assemblies as if they were strongly named, and it secures
the private key of the signature from being accessed at
different stages of development.

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What is delay signing?..

Answer / johncena

During development process you will need strong name keys to
be exposed to developer which
is not a good practice from security aspect point of view.In
such situations you can assign the key
later on and during development you an use delay signing
Following is process to delay sign an assembly:
√ First obtain your string name keys using SN.EXE.
√ Annotate the source code for the assembly with two custom
attributes from
System.Reflection: AssemblyKeyFileAttribute, which passes
the name of the file
containing the public key as a parameter to its constructor.
AssemblyDelaySignAttribute,
which indicates that delay signing, is being used by passing
true as a parameter to its
constructor. For example as shown below:
[Visual Basic]
<Assembly:AssemblyKeyFileAttribute("myKey.snk")>
<Assembly:AssemblyDelaySignAttribute(true)>
[C#]
[assembly:AssemblyKeyFileAttribute("myKey.snk")]
[assembly:AssemblyDelaySignAttribute(true)]
The compiler inserts the public key into the assembly
manifest and reserves space in the PE file for
the full strong name signature. The real public key must be
stored while the assembly is built so
that other assemblies that reference this assembly can
obtain the key to store in their own assembly
reference.
√ Because the assembly does not have a valid strong name
signature, the verification of
that signature must be turned off. You can do this by using
the –Vr option with the
Strong Name tool.The following example turns off
verification for an assembly called
myAssembly.dll.
Sn –Vr myAssembly.dll

√ Just before shipping, you submit the assembly to your
organization's signing authority
for the actual strong name signing using the –R option with
the Strong Name tool.
The following example signs an assembly called
myAssembly.dll with a strong name
using the sgKey.snk key pair.
Sn -R myAssembly.dll sgKey.snk