Add digital certificate authentication without paying any royalty?

Question

My application is closed source but free to use for all purposes. Whenever it is launched for the first time on any PC, this warning is showed for my application. I do not like it and want to solve this problem and I feel there are 2 possible solutions:

• Add a digital certificate authentication: Pay huge money to Verisign and get the certificate. But since I am not earning any money from the application itself, I cannot pump my own money just to satisfy Windows. Also I cannot use the free certificates as they are allowed only for open source applications and I do not plan to open source my application.

• Disable the warning message: Somehow make Windows to not show this warning.

Any ideas how I can get past my problem?

Answer 1

Are you creating an application or a VBA script? For applications code signing is not required - you are not obliged to sign the resulting XE and DLLs. If you don't do this, no warnings are shown.

And if you want the certificate authority to issue the certificate for you, you pay them for the service of checking your identity, confirming it and convincing others to trust their (CA's) certificate issued to you.

There seemed to be some CA issuing free code signing certificates but personally I would not trust such service, cause the service costs money and when it's given for free, there's something suspicious there.