SecretAgent Mobile Certificate Management

Last updated on: 6/19/2012 1:06 PM 
Created on: 11/2/2016 2:22 PM 

Certificate Management

The Certificate Explorer application is something I have been working on for the company since I wrote the original application that was shipped with SecretAgent version 5.0.  For SecretAgent Mobile the new look of Certificate Explorer was used.  Internally there are three components, certificate, category and container.  A certificate is the X.509 certificate and optionally a private key associated with the certificate.  A category groups certificates for certain devices or people into a group.  All certificates must be a member of a category so in some instances a general category is used as the default.  A container is the physical location the categories are located in.  Examples of containers are the device itself, Internet Explorer, an Oracle Database on a server, etc...  To allow for such customizations of physical certificate storage the certificate access class calls into an interface.  Each container implements its own interface providing an abstraction from the programmer who is trying to access the certificate from the details of how the certificate is actually stored and retrieved.

To present this architecture to the user I am using tabs to show the different container options.  When the user selects a container the category view (which is a list) is populated with the categories available in the container.  When the user selects a category the certificate view (another list) is populated with all the certificates that are available in that category.  This allows me to present something as awkward to the common user as certificates as an easier to understand address book.