Have you also encountered this error message when you are trying to add an assembly to the policy assembly list in ‘mscorcfg.msc’ saying that your assembly is not strong named?? I mean – you can only add assemblies from the GAC – i wonder how my assemblies make it in the GAC without having a strong name??? So this is clearly a bug of the tool.

I observed this behaviour on 1.1 and 2.0 and it happens randomly.

What always works, is to add the assembly programmatically – so i wrote this little tool, which may be also helpful for installation packages, whatever. enjoy.

using System;

using System.Reflection;

using System.Collections;

using System.Security.Permissions;

using System.Security.Policy;

using System.Security;

namespace LeastPrivilege.Tools

{

  class Program

  {

    static void Main(string[] args)

    {

      IEnumerator policyLevelEnumerator = SecurityManager.PolicyHierarchy();

      while (policyLevelEnumerator.MoveNext())

      {

        PolicyLevel lvl = (PolicyLevel)policyLevelEnumerator.Current;

        if (“Machine” == lvl.Label)

        {

          AssemblyName asm = AssemblyName.GetAssemblyName(args[0]);

          StrongNamePublicKeyBlob snpkb =
              new StrongNamePublicKeyBlob(asm.GetPublicKey());

          StrongName sn = new StrongName(snpkb, asm.Name, asm.Version);

          lvl.AddFullTrustAssembly(sn);

          SecurityManager.SavePolicyLevel(lvl);

          foreach (StrongNameMembershipCondition snmc in lvl.FullTrustAssemblies)

            Console.WriteLine(snmc.Name);

          break;

        }

      }       

    }

  }

}