What’s a ‘Stinger Root Certificate’? I’m not really sure, but it’s the certificate that Microsoft uses to sign a number of software components that they release for Windows CE and mobile devices, for example, the Application Verifier for Windows CE and Windows Mobile 5.0 or MSMQ. The certificate is installed part of the Windows Mobile 5 emulator image, but on phones, like the HTC diamond, they aren’t installed. Hence running the Application Verifier, because it needs to load the Stinger signed kernel module, Shim Engine (shimeng.dll), it would not work on the HTC as it doesn’t have the certificate “Stinger Root Certificate” installed.

You can actually see the certificates installed by connecting your mobile device and in Visual Studio (2008), going to Tools > Device Security Manager. There was the old Security Configuration Manager which I tried but crashed on me on start up, so don’t use that. In it you can see all the certificates installed and you can also change your device security level.

Anyway, I wanted to install the root certificate but I could not find it distributed anywhere on the internet. In the end, using the Device Security Manager I managed to extract it out of the emulator ROM, by copy and pasting the certificate base64 value. After that was just a matter of building a cab install package and defining the certificate installation in setup XML.

The result is available here