How can I sign a file using RSA and SHA256 with .NET?

Question

My application will take a set of files and sign them. (I'm not trying to sign an assembly.) There is a .p12 file that I get the private key from.

This is the code I was trying to use, but I get a System.Security.Cryptography.CryptographicException "Invalid algorithm specified.".

X509Certificate pXCert = new X509Certificate2(@"keyStore.p12", "password");
RSACryptoServiceProvider csp = (RSACryptoServiceProvider)pXCert.PrivateKey;
string id = CryptoConfig.MapNameToOID("SHA256");
return csp.SignData(File.ReadAllBytes(filePath), id);

According to this answer it can't be done (the RSACryptoServiceProvider does not support SHA-256), but I was hoping that it might be possible using a different library, like Bouncy Castle.

I'm new to this stuff and I'm finding Bouncy Castle to be very confusing. I'm porting a Java app to C# and I have to use the same type of encryption to sign the files, so I am stuck with RSA + SHA256.

How can I do this using Bouncy Castle, OpenSSL.NET, Security.Cryptography, or another 3rd party library I haven't heard of? I'm assuming, if it can be done in Java then it can be done in C#.

UPDATE:

this is what I got from the link in poupou's anwser

        X509Certificate2 cert = new X509Certificate2(KeyStoreFile, password");
        RSACryptoServiceProvider rsacsp = (RSACryptoServiceProvider)cert.PrivateKey;
        CspParameters cspParam = new CspParameters();
        cspParam.KeyContainerName = rsacsp.CspKeyContainerInfo.KeyContainerName;
        cspParam.KeyNumber = rsacsp.CspKeyContainerInfo.KeyNumber == KeyNumber.Exchange ? 1 : 2;
        RSACryptoServiceProvider aescsp = new RSACryptoServiceProvider(cspParam);
        aescsp.PersistKeyInCsp = false;
        byte[] signed = aescsp.SignData(File.ReadAllBytes(file), "SHA256");
        bool isValid = aescsp.VerifyData(File.ReadAllBytes(file), "SHA256", signed);

The problem is that I'm not getting the same results as I got with the original tool. As far as I can tell from reading the code the CryptoServiceProvider that does the actual signing is not using the PrivateKey from key store file. Is that Correct?

Answer 1

RSA + SHA256 can and will work...

Your later example may not work all the time, it should use the hash algorithm's OID, rather than it's name. As per your first example, this is obtained from a call to CryptoConfig.MapNameToOID(AlgorithmName) where AlgorithmName is what you are providing (i.e. "SHA256").

First you are going to need is the certificate with the private key. I normally read mine from the LocalMachine or CurrentUser store by using a public key file (.cer) to identify the private key, and then enumerate the certificates and match on the hash...

X509Certificate2 publicCert = new X509Certificate2(@"C:\mycertificate.cer");

//Fetch private key from the local machine store
X509Certificate2 privateCert = null;
X509Store store = new X509Store(StoreLocation.LocalMachine);
store.Open(OpenFlags.ReadOnly);
foreach( X509Certificate2 cert in store.Certificates)
{
    if (cert.GetCertHashString() == publicCert.GetCertHashString())
        privateCert = cert;
}

However you get there, once you've obtained a certificate with a private key we need to reconstruct it. This may be required due to the way the certificate creates it's private key, but I'm not really sure why. Anyway, we do this by first exporting the key and then re-importing it using whatever intermediate format you like, the easiest is xml:

//Round-trip the key to XML and back, there might be a better way but this works
RSACryptoServiceProvider key = new RSACryptoServiceProvider();
key.FromXmlString(privateCert.PrivateKey.ToXmlString(true));

Once that is done we can now sign a piece of data as follows:

//Create some data to sign
byte[] data = new byte[1024];

//Sign the data
byte[] sig = key.SignData(data, CryptoConfig.MapNameToOID("SHA256"));

Lastly, the verification can be done directly with the certificate's public key without need for the reconstruction as we did with the private key:

key = (RSACryptoServiceProvider)publicCert.PublicKey.Key;
if (!key.VerifyData(data, CryptoConfig.MapNameToOID("SHA256"), sig))
    throw new CryptographicException();