Question

Does anyone know how to open up the “Certificate Information” screen based on the SSL from the WebBrowser control?

Answer 1

This can be achieved by using a class called X509Certificate2UI.

To make this class avalable to you, you need to add a reference to System.Security.dll

In the X509Certificate2UI class you have a meyhod called DisplayCertificate() which takes an X509Certificate2 object as a parameter. When invoked, this method shows a dialog box displaying all cert information including chaining, exactly the same as the dialog box you will find in IE.

The webbrowser control can only return a X509Certificate which can then be passed into the constructor of the X509Certificate2 class.

So the code looks as such:

//includes on top
using System.Security;
using System.Security.Cryptography;
using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates;

//Do webrequest to get info on secure site
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("https://securesite.com");
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
response.Close();

//retrieve the ssl cert and assign it to an X509Certificate object
X509Certificate cert = request.ServicePoint.Certificate;

//convert the X509Certificate to an X509Certificate2 object by passing it into the constructor
X509Certificate2 cert2 = new X509Certificate2(cert);

//display the cert dialog box
X509Certificate2UI.DisplayCertificate(cert2);