Problems with SignerSignEx2
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Alexander P
41
Reputation points
Hi!
I found a problem with a Windows signing API (SignerSignEx2) with some PowerShell files.
There is an article (: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows/win32/signtool-corrupts-powershell-script) that deals with a similar problem with Signtool.
But the core of the problem is not Signtool but the Windows API, which kills some PowerShell files.
Will there be a fix to this problem or do I have to check the PowerShell files for a signature and remove it before signing?
Windows development | Windows API - Win32
{count} votes
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Alexander P 41 Reputation points
2025-08-12T11:32:18.6866667+00:00 I found another problem with the signing API.
If you have a PowerShell file that is encoded in UTF16 BE, signtool (and the Windows API) will prompt:
SignTool Error: An unexpected internal error has occurred.
Error information: "Error: SignerSign() failed." (-2147024883/0x8007000d)
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RLWA32 50,071 Reputation points2025-08-12T13:05:47.0033333+00:00 The error code 0x800700d means "The data is invalid." I am not surprised that the windows API functions dislike UTF-16BE encoding since they generally work with UTF-16LE or UTF-8.
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Alexander P 41 Reputation points
2025-08-12T13:09:15.3266667+00:00 The problem is that I have a customer that has lots of PowerShell-Files in this format. So they need to write a script to change all those files to UTF8 or UTF-16LE. MS should fix it.
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RLWA32 50,071 Reputation points
2025-08-12T14:25:02.0133333+00:00 As far as I know, using UTF-8 for Windows system locale is still a work in process. Using UTF-16LE might be a safer choice.
On my Win10 22H2 system -
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Alexander P 41 Reputation points
2025-08-12T14:28:23.09+00:00 But this won't change the behavior of the API and my customer still has to convert all his PS files.
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RLWA32 50,071 Reputation points
2025-08-12T14:51:39.7166667+00:00 But this won't change the behavior of the API and my customer still has to convert all his PS files.
I understand. What I didn't express clearly was that converting to UTF-16LE would be the safer choice if your customer wants to use a "unicode" encoding.
You might want to test it just to be sure.
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