It is really crucial for you that your customers have trust in your program or software that they are downloading from the internet and installing. All they need is to know that those are actually coming from you and not from any other third-party masquerading with your name.
Apart from this, they also need to know that in its lifetime, it has not been altered by any third party, like having malware inserted. With the code signing, you will be able to tell your customers that only your company is the official publisher of those codes.
You can get more pieces of information about code signing on this website.
What Is Code Signing?
When you are downloading software or programs, code signing offers a guarantee that the code of the specific software or program has not been tampered with or corrupted after the publisher signed it. Let’s understand the whole concept with a simpler example.
When you are logging into your bank account, you always want to be sure that you are giving the password to the specifically intended bank and not to a man-in-the-middle attacker.
So, it is best to ensure that you are using the programs and updates that are totally safe and also from authentic publishers.
How Does Code Signing Work?
From the viewpoint of a developer, there are three major components of code signing. And they are
- Code Signing Applications.
- Code Signing Certificates.
- Unsigned Software Files.
The very code signing applications normally come with the operating systems, for example, Mac OSX, Windows, etc., often, the code signing certificates come from CAs or Certificate Authorities.
When in order to protect a message from unwanted viewers, you encode that same message; it is called encryption. By passing that message through a mathematical function, or key the value is being changed. At the time of decoding the message, a key is also used to shift it to the original state, and the message can be read.
In public encryption, both the encrypting and decrypting keys are totally different for a message. In order to ensure the security of that particular message, the private key is kept secret while the public key is widely available.
Before signing the work, developers need to generate a pair of public and private keys. Through some software tools, all these are done often. After this, the developer provides the private key along with the identity information of the organization to a trustworthy CA.
After verifying the authenticity of the identity information, the CA issues the certificate to the developer.
Why Do You Need Code Signing?
Here are the reasons why you need code signing. Code signing always helps in proving the content source along with content integrity.
Content Source
Code signing always identifies that the application or software is coming from a specific developer or signer. When any software is downloaded from the internet, the browser exhibits a warning message about the possible threats of downloading data or displays a warning of “unknown publisher.”
With code signing, you will be able to remove the “unknown publisher” security warnings along with identifying the name of the publisher.
Content Integrity
Code signing also makes sure that any piece of code has not been altered. In addition to that, it also determines whether the code is trustworthy for a particular purpose or not. In case the software or application code is altered or tampered with after digitally signing, the particular signature will appear untrusted and invalid.
Signing code is beneficial both for the users and developers. Users are always assured from whom they are downloading the software and also decide whether they should trust the source or not. At the same time, developers are able to mark their brand for protecting their software from unwanted changes.
Final Verdict
So, these are the things that you need to know about code signing. From this article, it is now clear that code signing is necessary for both the users and the developers. It ensures the safety and security of a software or program when the user is downloading it from the internet.
