SymSMB 2.0 Beta

Telexy have released a beta of SymSMB 2.0. You need to sign the application to your IMIE so you can use. I wrote a guide on how to sign SIS applications because it turned out not to be very obvious.

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How to Sign Nokia’s S60 Symbian SIS applications

Nokia wants to protect you from all the bad boogymen in internetland. It insists that all fully signed S60 applications go through a QA procedure. I think this is a good thing. The last thing I want is a virus chomping up my expensive data rate on my mobile phone. However it does mean you can’t be a beta tester for a lot of Symbian software houses without self-signing. This is because Nokia also allow you to sign applications for one phone without the hefty QA.

This is a, quick, simple guide to signing stuff. It won’t teach you development. It’s really the basics. It also only works in windows because it requires some of Nokia’s Win32 applications. I did use Windows in Parallels on my Mac though. These apps might work in Cross Over Office, I haven’t tried. You can self-sign using one the guides below, however I recommend following the whole thing because it allows you to sign protected apps for your phone.

The basic steps to make this work are:

1. generate a key to sign with,
2. get a signing certificate from Nokia
3. and then sign the application

The first bit is actually surprisingly easy. The ‘key’ in this case is just an SSL certificate. I’m not going to talk you through creating one. You can copy step 2 from the Nokia guide to self-certification with the tools from this Adobe article on creating SIS files. Otherwise the makekeys.exe application has the usual CLI help by running the command with no parameters.

Once you have a key you need to get Nokia to provide you with a certificate to sign your apps with. You’ll need to make an account on Symbian Signed. You can then download the developer certificate request tool. This program, once installed, makes CSR files that you can upload to Symbian Signed to get a certificate.

If you run the developer certificate request tool, the first thing is to pick a place to save the CSR file. Once that’s done hit next. Select no to the ACS Pub ID, unless you happen to have a Verisign SSL certificate lying around. Since you aren’t using publicly signed key you can only get a certificate for one phone. You can get your IMEI by typing *#06#. Enter this number by hitting the button right next to the IMEIs. Finish up and save you should now have a CSR file wherever you saved it.

Go to Symbian Signed and log-in. In the tab menu at the top select ‘My Symbian Signed’. The next page should have a menu on the left. Select ‘Developer’ then ‘Certificates’ then ‘Request’. Upload the CSR file and fill in the nasty CAPTCHA. Follow the link on the page you get sent to, in order to download your certificate.

Finally go back to the command line and you can run the signsis.exe command to sign your application (but only for the IMEI you entered remember). In order to do it use:

signsis unsigned.sis new_signed.sis certificate.cer your.key password_to_key

You can request more certificates for more IMEIs if you want. Since you didn’t use an ACS signed key a warning will always come up on the phone during with whatever details you used when making your original key.

Thanks to all the articles above to their help piece this together and to GSM Blog for it’s excellent article on this topic.

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