How to create a certificate to use with SslStream AuthenticateAsServer without importing

Q:

I'm lost in a twisty maze of certificates and private keys.

I am writing a server in C#. I want it to accept SSL connections. For test purposes, I want to generate a certificate for "localhost", and use that certificate for the server. Ideally I don't want to pollute my certificate store, so I just want a file, or files, on disk that the C# code can load to provide the certificate.

Everything I have tried (using cookbook approaches suggested by web searches) either gives me "The credentials supplied to the package were not recognized" or "The server mode SSL must use a certificate with the associated private key."

Is there a way to generate a certificate and private key, and subsequently to load them into an X509Certificate object without also loading them into my machine certificate store?

A:

In the end, I ran the following to create a server.pfx file:

makecert.exe -r -pe -n "CN=localhost" -sky exchange -sv server.pvk server.cer pvk2pfx -pvk server.pvk -spc server.cer -pfx server.pfx

Then I loaded it in code with:

certificate = new X509Certificate2("server.pfx", "password");

(I didn't actually hard code the password like that :-)

The trick was to know that I needed a pfx file, and that I needed to load it using the X509Certificate2 class, rather than X509Certificate.

original url:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14214396/how-to-create-a-certificate-to-use-with-sslstream-authenticateasserver-without-i