How to get a Cryptographic Public Key from a Certificate in a Windows Store application

If you're writing a Windows Store application you'll find that the WinRT runtime is missing the X509Certificate interfaces found in .NET.  In many instances, you may want to encrypt or verify a signature with any given certificate.  That means extracting the public key out of the certificate.  .NET has the X509Certificate2 class that simply contains the property X509Certificate.PublicKey.Key which returns an RSACryptographicServiceProvider.  However, there's no WinRT equivalent class.

The common suggestion to get around the problem is to build a .NET application to extract the public key into a base64 string.  Later this encoded public key could be used from your Windows Store application.
The code snippet to do this would look something like this:

// Base64 encoded public key gotten previously from a .NET app
string pubKeyStr = "MIGJ...";
byte[] pubKeyBytes = CryptographicBuffer.decodeFromBase64String(pubKeyStr);

AsymmetricKeyAlgorithmProvider alg = AsymmetricKeyAlgorithmProvider.openAlgorithm(AsymmetricAlgorithmNames.RsaPkcs1);
CryptographicKey pubKey = alg.importPublicKey(pubKeyBytes, CryptographicPublicKeyBlobType.pkcs1RsaPublicKey);

I wrote a general solution to the problem. The code extracts the Public key from a base64 encoded certificate. No need to pre-extract the key from a separate application. This code can be used until WinRT provides a robust set of Certificate classes.

Hope this helps!

public CryptographicKey GetCryptographicPublicKeyFromCert(string strCert)
{
    int length;
    CryptographicKey CryptKey = null;
    byte[] bCert = Convert.FromBase64String(strCert);

    // Assume Cert contains RSA public key
    // Find matching OID in the certificate and return public key
    byte[] rsaOID = EncodeOID("1.2.840.113549.1.1.1");
    int index = FindX509PubKeyIndex(bCert, rsaOID, out length);

    // Found X509PublicKey in certificate so copy it.
    if (index > -1)
    {
        byte[] X509PublicKey = new byte[length];
        Array.Copy(bCert, index, X509PublicKey, 0, length);

        AsymmetricKeyAlgorithmProvider AlgProvider = AsymmetricKeyAlgorithmProvider.OpenAlgorithm(AsymmetricAlgorithmNames.RsaPkcs1);
        CryptKey = AlgProvider.ImportPublicKey(CryptographicBuffer.CreateFromByteArray(X509PublicKey));
    }

    return CryptKey;
}

static int FindX509PubKeyIndex(byte[] Reference, byte[] value, out int length)
{
    int index = -1;
    bool found;
    length = 0;

    for (int n = 0; n < Reference.Length; n++)
    {
        if ((Reference[n] == value[0]) && (n + value.Length < Reference.Length))
        {
            index = n;
            found = true;

            for (int m = 1; m < value.Length; m++) {

                if (Reference[n+m] != value[m]) {
                    found = false;
                    break;
                }
            }

            if (found) break;
            else index = -1;
        }
    }           

    if (index > -1)
    {
        // Find outer Sequence
        while (index > 0 && Reference[index] != 0x30) index--;
        index--;
        while (index > 0 && Reference[index] != 0x30) index--;               
    }

    if (index > -1)
    {
        // Find the length of encoded Public Key
        if ((Reference[index + 1] & 0x80) == 0x80)
        {
            int numBytes = Reference[index + 1] & 0x7F;
            for (int m = 0; m < numBytes; m++)
            {
                length += (Reference[index + 2 + m] << ((numBytes - 1 - m) * 8));
            }

            length += 4;
        }
        else
        {
            length = Reference[index + 1] + 2;
        }
    }

    return index;
}

static public byte[] EncodeOID(string szOID)
{
    int[] OIDNums;
    byte[] pbEncodedTemp = new byte[64];
    byte[] pbEncoded = null;
    int n, index, num, count;

    OIDNums = ParseOID(szOID);
    pbEncodedTemp[0] = 6;
    pbEncodedTemp[2] = Convert.ToByte(OIDNums[0] * 40 + OIDNums[1]);

    count = 1;

    for (n = 2, index = 3; n < OIDNums.Length; n++)
    {
        num = OIDNums[n];

        if (num >= 16384)
        {
            pbEncodedTemp[index++] = Convert.ToByte(num / 16384 | 0x80);
            num = num % 16384;
            count++;
        }

        if (num >= 128)
        {
            pbEncodedTemp[index++] = Convert.ToByte(num / 128 | 0x80);
            num = num % 128;
            count++;
        }　

        pbEncodedTemp[index++] = Convert.ToByte(num);
        count++;
    }

    pbEncodedTemp[1] = Convert.ToByte(count);
    pbEncoded = new byte[count + 2];
    Array.Copy(pbEncodedTemp, 0, pbEncoded, 0, count + 2);

    return pbEncoded;
}

static public int[] ParseOID(string szOID)
{
    int nlast, n = 0;
    bool fFinished = false;
    int count = 0;
    int[] dwNums = null;

    do
    {
        nlast = n;
        n = szOID.IndexOf(".", nlast);
        if (n == -1) fFinished = true;
        count++;
        n++;
    } while (fFinished == false);

    dwNums = new int[count];
    count = 0;
    fFinished = false;

    do
    {
        nlast = n;
        n = szOID.IndexOf(".", nlast);
        if (n != -1)
        {
            dwNums[count] = Convert.ToInt32(szOID.Substring(nlast, n - nlast), 10);
        }
        else
        {
            fFinished = true;
            dwNums[count] = Convert.ToInt32(szOID.Substring(nlast, szOID.Length - nlast), 10);
        }

        n++;
        count++;
    } while (fFinished == false);

    return dwNums;
}