Certificate viewer is a plugin for Altap Salamander, allowing a user to view information about encrypted certificate files. Currently it supports viewing of X.509 certificates in the following formats: PEM (Base64 encoding), DER (encoded binary).
The plugin is based on the OpenSSL project and it automates openssl commands,
that parse and dump information from certificate files. Moreover, it does automatic detection of a file format, and supports most of the common certificate file formats.
To get started, download and install the Altap Salamander SDK. This project was developed with the latest version 4.0, which was not yet officially published. However, there's an unofficiall SDK available here: https://github.com/lejcik/as-sdk4-unofficial
Download and unpack the archive with SDK into your project directory. Project file is preconfigured to use the Altap Salamander SDK, so it has to be cloned into path: salamand\plugins\certviewer.
Project depends also on the OpenSSL library, it was depeloped and tested with version 3.0.7. Porting it to a never version should be smooth. Poject is preconfigured to use vcpkg utility, which automates installation of 3rd party libraries, and Visual Studio can then automatically detect and use the installed libraries.
Clone the vcpkg repository into your project directory.
c:\projects> git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg.git
Build and integrate the vcpkg utility:
c:\projects> cd vcpkg
c:\projects\vcpkg> bootstrap-vcpkg.bat
c:\projects\vcpkg> vcpkg integrate install
And install the OpenSSL library (both x86 and x64 static libraries):
c:\projects\vcpkg> vcpkg install openssl:x86-windows-static
c:\projects\vcpkg> vcpkg install openssl:x64-windows-static
We have the development environment ready. Now you can open this project in Visual Studio, project files are in as308sdk\salamand\plugins\certviewer\vcproj\. Project is preconfigured for Visual Studio 2022, but it would be easy to downgrade it to older versions (some tips are here). Compilation should be successful.
Altap Salamander SDK contains a special version of salamand.exe, which should be used for debugging plugins under developent. It can be found here: as308sdk\bin\vc2008\SDK_x86\salamand.exe (or under SDK_X64). Configure your project in Visual Studio, let it starts this executable for debugging the plugin. Once salamander is running, open Plugins Manager dialog from Plugins menu, press Add... button and find the certview.spl file, that was compiled by this project.
The CertView plugin views information of the most common certificate files. List of the registered file extensions can be seen in Configuration dialog from Options menu, under path Viewers and Editors/Viewers.
This is a viewer plugin, so select a certificate file in Salamander, press F3 key and the viewer will show information about the certificate. If you want to see the raw data instead, press Shift+F3 keys. Plugin asks user for password if the certificate file is password protected and the password length is not zero.
This is my first project where I used the OpenSSL library. I don't feel as a security expert, so your contributions are welcome. Here are some ways you can contribute:
- Unicode support once Salamander will be Unicode ready.
- Language modules (yet only
english.slglang module is provided). - Add support for a certificate consistency test, as the certificate file may be corrupted. This is a time consuming operation (may take a few seconds), so it has to be started by a user. Moreover, current OpenSSL check functions (
EVP_PKEY_check()and others) doesn't allow breaking an ongoing operation, so user will not to be able to cancel it. - Add support for other certificate file types, e.g. PGP ones.
- Viewing a password protected certificate file from a file find dialog may be confusing, as the dialog is opened above the main window and may be hidden below the file find dialog. This issue has to be fixed in the Salamander's core.
- Only ANSI characters are accepted for a certificate password. Without Unicode support from Salamander it's not possible to enter Unicode characters into edit-box in the password dialog.
Code licensed under the Unilicense.