Question

I have exported a key pair (public and private key) into a single cert from a Win2k8 server. I then used OpenSSL to convert it to a pem:

openssl pkcs12 -in cert.pfx -out cert.pem -nodes

I then put the contents of the .pem in a MSSQL table, Varchar(max) column type.

Using .NET Framework 4.0 only.

I get the cert like this:

var bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("certstringfromdatabase");
var cert = new X509Certificate(bytes, passwordstring);

I get an error “Cryptographic Exception was unhandled Cannot find the specified object.”

Am I converting to byte[] incorrectly? This is for a custom WCF service with TCP binding, I am trying to use the certificate for SSL without touching the internal store (because this will be one day migrated to Azure worker role I can’t use a cert store or filesystem).

Thanks for all ideas.

Answer 1

There is much more involved than what I was doing.

Check out http://www.codeproject.com/KB/security/CertificatesToDBandBack.aspx and that’s that.