Dumping Strong-Name Keypair Paths Used by Microsoft

When you want to sign a managed assembly with a strong name, you must do so with a key pair in the form of an snk file. Microsoft's assemblies are no exception. After seeing a few assemblies signed by Microsoft, I couldn't help but notice that they reveal some information about their internal filesystem. So I decided to dump all of the AssemblyKeyFileAttribute objects associated with every assembly registered in the GAC (global assembly cache). What follows is the PowerShell v3 command I used to generate the results and the results themselves.

(Get-ChildItem C:\Windows\assembly -Recurse -Include '*.dll' | % { [Reflection.Assembly]::ReflectionOnlyLoadFrom($_).CustomAttributes } | ? { $_.AttributeType.Name -eq 'AssemblyKeyFileAttribute' } | % { $_.ConstructorArguments.Value }) 2> $null

..\..\..\..\tools\devdiv\FinalPublicKey.snk
c:\oob\public\ext\sdk\vs9sp1\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\MSSharedLibSN1024.snk
d:\DMG_1102CTP\src\tools\devdiv\35MSSharedLib1024.snk
d:\oobwdeploy\public\ext\sdk\vs9rtm\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\MSSharedLibSN1024.snk
d:\sp1qfe.public.x86fre\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\windows.snk
d:\w7rtm.public.amd64fre\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\windows.snk
d:\w8rtm.public.amd64fre\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\windows.snk
d:\w8rtm.public.x86fre\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\windows.snk
d:\webmatrix22_rtw\public\ext\sdk\vs10sp1\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\MSSharedLibSN1024.snk
d:\win7_winmain.public.amd64fre\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\windows.snk
d:\win8_gdr.public.x86fre\internal\strongnamekeys\fake\windows.snk
E:\DNA\public\tools\common\security\FinalPublicKey.snk
e:\sql11_main_t\\sql\Common\SNK\SQL2003SNKEY.snk
e:\sql12_main_t\\sql\Common\SNK\SQL2003SNKEY.snk
f:\\dd\\Tools\\devdiv\\FinalPublicKey.snk
F:\dd\tools\devdiv\35MSSharedLib1024.snk
f:\dd\tools\devdiv\EcmaPublicKey.snk
f:\dd\tools\devdiv\FinalPublicKey.snk
f:\dd\wpf\src\windows.snk
f:\RTM\Tools\devdiv\FinalPublicKey.snk
FinalPublicKey.snk

While this information doesn't reveal anything of much value, it's interesting nonetheless to view the inconsistencies in Microsoft's signing procedure. At least they don't store all their keys in one basket!