I plan on selling my stencils with vba macros. Has anybody purchased the digital signatures from a trusted MS partner? Would you share your experience and insight?
My goal is to assure my customers that the product is safe.
The cost from the MS trusted partners seems to defeat any profit I expect to gain though.
http://codesigning.ksoftware.net/ (http://codesigning.ksoftware.net/)
Just a happy customer.
I could recommend this one: http://startssl.com/ - almost three times cheaper ;)
(Class2 - $60 for 2 years). These are okay for signing for macro / exe / setup.
Note that there is a small catch, though - if a customer did not run windows update for 3 years, this certificate won't work (they became root authority not that long ago).
Mind that only if you need WinQUAL (e.g. to be able to pick up crash dumps of you program from Microsoft servers) or e.g. for a device driver, or you want to pass windows logo certifications you have to go to VeriSign / GlobalSign. (In fact, you can still buy one now for $100 / year from VeriSign (Symantec now). The link to buy for $100 instead of $500 is still there on VeriSign site, they just made it extremely hard to find)
Thanks Nikolay and Paul! You guys are always helpful.
What do you think of Fastspring?
http://webification.com/ecommerce-providers-comparison (http://webification.com/ecommerce-providers-comparison)
That article is very out of date, and Fastspring don't sell signing certificates.
Thanks
It turns out that cheap StartSLL certificates ($60 for 2 years) have a limitation.
The signature expires when certificate expires, even if the signed binary/macro has a timestamp.
That is, normally the signature does not expire when certificate expires, if it was valid at the time of signing;
this is not the case for (usual) StartSLL certificates (they have specific flag set in the certificate).
Interesting