Unknown Publisher when signing with Verisign

Question

I have tried to resolve this issue before, but I have not been able to fully solve it. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I have a solution being developed in Visual Studio 2010, which has several projects associated with it. Since the solution installs a service, and a tray app to controls it, the tray must be run as administrator.

I am signing each dll and exe with a Verisign certificate, and the log reports the signing to be successful. At first, I used a script to sign everything before building the installer. I then tried signing everything both before and after. Recently, I thought I had solved the issue by moving the signing of each project to a post build event for the project.

When installing the company name shows up under publisher, so I know the installer files are being signed correctly. The problem happens after installing, when the application is started up. The UAC security popup appears, but publisher is listed as unknown.

I have added a post-build event to each project similar to this:

c:\Verisign\signtool.exe sign /f "c:\Verisign\Certificate.2012.pfx" /p password /t http://timestamp.verisign.com/scripts/timstamp.dll "C:\Code\Service\bin\App.dll"

It seems like this should work. Can anyone tell me what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

I've finally managed to figure out what I was doing wrong here. I was using a Windows installer that was using Project Output for the files. Although these files were signed in the bin folder, they were no longer signed after the app was installed.

Instead of using Project Output, I manually added all DLL and EXE files that I wanted included in the installer. After doing this, the company name started showing up when the UAC popup appeared.

I would prefer using project output, since it seems a bit more integrated, but I would much rather have a working solution.