How to create a minimal dummy X509Certificate2?

Question

I\'m unit testing a .NET application; some of the unit tests involve programmatically generating X509Certificate2 objects.

I don\'t care about actual signing/private

Answer 1

This may seem very hacky, and it depends on how pragmatic you want to be ... an approach I used was to just grab a random certificate from the machine.

This was good when: - I know that every machine that's running these tests has a valid certificate. - I was using GIT and didn't want to check in a binary file for the cert - I don't care about the cert content - I'm using code that's not mock friendly and explicitly requires a non-mockable X509Certificate object.

Definitely not bullet proof, but unblocked me and unblocked my testing scenario.

    static X509Certificate2 GetRandomCertificate()
    {
        X509Store st = new X509Store(StoreName.My, StoreLocation.LocalMachine);
        st.Open(OpenFlags.ReadOnly);
        try
        {
            var certCollection = st.Certificates;

            if (certCollection.Count == 0)
            {
                return null;
            }
            return certCollection[0];
        }
        finally
        {
            st.Close();
        }
    }