Manage Certificates Used for Signing

On the Certificates tab of Archive Properties, you can view information about X.509 certificates that have been used to sign files in an archive. You can also export any public key certificates based on the X.509 standard that you do not already have installed on your system. This information is not available for archives signed with OpenPGP keys.

To view information about an X.509 certificate, Click View Certificate to open the Certificate Properties dialog.

Export Public Keys to Your System

A certificate has two keys:

• A private key, used for signing and decrypting

• A public key, used for authenticating a signature and for encrypting for the owner of the certificate

If an archive is signed or contains signed files, certificates that have the public keys needed to authenticate the signatures are included in the archive. You can export these public key certificates to install on your system if you do not already have them. (A method that works on most Windows systems is to right-click the exported certificate file in Windows Explorer and choose Install certificate.) Once the certificate is installed, you can use its key with email that you send or receive from the owner.

To export public keys for certificates used to sign files in the current archive:

1.  Choose Export to open a Save As dialog.

2.  Enter a name and location for the file.

Smartcrypt attaches the file name extension.p7c unless you specify a different one. This is the conventional extension for this type of file.

Note: A .p7c file can contain all the certificates in a certificate chain. Certificates are issued in chains: one certificate may be issued by another certificate further back in the chain. The chain starts with a root certificate issued by a trusted certificate authority.