Can I sign my AutoCAD .NET plug-in with a strong name?

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4 responses to “Can I sign my AutoCAD .NET plug-in with a strong name?”

1. 

   Andrey

   August 27, 2012

   And I too was faced with this problem in the past, and the solution of Autodesk wasn’t pleasant to me…

   A strongly named assembly adheres to a stricter versioning policy: patching the dll is trickier;
   Administrator can to manage search of assembly via acad.config file. It even is convenient. What can be a problem in it?
   A strongly named assembly must be installed into the GAC to avoid the performance hit related to extra validation.
   How strongly it influences on productivity?
   The GAC itself further complicates deployment.
   What’s the problem?
   However there are workarounds available:
   The offered answers aren’t responses to the given question.

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2. 

   Albert

   October 29, 2012

   Hi Andrey,
   If we strongly name an assembly then we must put into the GAC otherwise we take a massive performance hit when the assembly is loaded (because all pages in the image must be loaded and hashed).
   Once we put an assembly into the GAC we must make sure that the dependencies of the assembly are also in the GAC or SxS so that they can be loaded.
   acmgd.dll depends on acad.exe which means that we would have to put acad.exe and all of its dependencies into the GAC/SxS. This would create more problems than it would solve. See how VS 2012 moves away from SxS to offer easier deployment for C/C++ runtime, MFC.
   Albert
   on behalf of the AutoCAD Team

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3. 

   Carl

   March 2, 2015

   ok, 2015 autocad has stuffed us!!! pre-2014 we could do binary serialization on our custom object, but no longer!!! not either autocad or net4.5 REQUIRES strongly typed names in the GAC to do this!!! So now I’m desperately trying to get and attach a cert for interanl software!! I just did and guess what – “vbc : error BC30145: Unable to emit assembly: Referenced assembly ‘Acdbmgd’ does not have a strong name” – with a digital signature. What the heck are we supposed to do here!!??

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4. 

   Ben

   March 20, 2016

   So then, what are the implications if i want to obfuscate my dll?
   I’m quoting from the CryptoObfucsator manual:

   Enable Tamper Detection
   When checked, Crypto Obfuscator will itself perform strong name verification of the assembly even if strong-name verification has been turned OFF on the machine on which the assembly is running or if the assembly has been registered in the verification ‘skip-list’ – this is typically done by hackers or crackers. Furthermore, the strong name verification is done using the original key used to sign the assembly when it was obfuscated by Crypto Obfuscator. Thus, strong name verification fails even if the key is removed or replaced – again something typically done by hackers or crackers.
   Note that your assembly must be originally strong named for this to work and you must specify the same strong name key via the Signing / Authenticode tab. If you turn ON this setting for an assembly for which you have not specified a strong name key, you will receive the following error message:
   The assembly xyz has the ‘Enable Tamper Detection’ setting ON but no key file is specified via the ‘Signing / Authenticode’ tab. Please specify a key file and try again.
   So what are the implications of this: I cannot enable tamper detection on my assembly using crypto-obfuscate?
   rgds
   Ben

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