Adding self-signed root certificates to Windows mobile devices

If you're a small shop and you don't think you need to have third-party certificates generated for you, you can always create one yourself by setting up Certificate Services and fulfilling a certificate request from yourself.

The process has been fairly well documented for creating a self-signed certificate to use on a server. (See the MSExchange.org article, SSL-enabling OWA 2003 using your own certificate authority.) But what if you want to take your self-signed root certificate and manually add it to one or more mobile devices?

There are a few ways to do this, although they all require management access to the mobile devices. One particularly interesting way is to take the root certificate, turn it into a .CAB file, and then deploy it to the mobile devices.

Some types of management systems (such as OTA or "over-the-air") will only deploy .CAB files., and Installing certificates via .CAB files may work if you're trying to add the certif

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icate to a store on the mobile device other than the root store.

The full technique has been published on the Windows Mobile Team Blog:, How to add your own root cert via CAB file. There aren't a lot of steps involved, but be aware of these critical issues before you get started:

About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of Windows Insight, a newsletter devoted to hints, tips, tricks, news and goodies for all flavors of Windows users.

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