Friday, November 24, 2006

CardSpace Backup viewer

Ever wonder what's inside a CardSpace backup file? Now that the xmldap.org codebase can decrypt the backup files, I thought I'd add a quick tool that allows you to peek inside. Here's a little web app which will decrypt your backup file and return the xml inside:

http://xmldap.org/sts/decrypt

And here's a screencast of how it works:

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Will this decrypt any cardspace backup file? I constantly get the error:
There was an error decrypting your backup: Error Parsing Roaming Store

Also, I can only hit the decrypt page with IE. When using firefox the HTML source is displayed rather than rendered.

cmort said...

I've only tested with backup files from the official release of CardSpace - I've not tried with any old CTPs.

What version are you using?

In terms of Firefox, that is very odd, as that is what I primarily developed with, and I tested on both OS X and XP. What platform are you on?

Anonymous said...

I used XP with the latest version of IE 7 and .NET 3 RC1 (all the latest as far as I can tell)

I also get the same error when using a backup file created from Vista RC1.

After some testing, the firefox issue hitting the decrpyt page only occurs when I use a proxy.

cmort said...

Hi Rob...

This likely won't work with the RC1 version of CardSpace - you'd need to update to the official release which shipped a few weeks ago:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=10cc340b-f857-4a14-83f5-25634c3bf043&DisplayLang=en

cmort said...

Hmmm...link didn't print to well. Try this:

http://tinyurl.com/ylyy4k

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the help. That was exactly the problem. Looks like they made a change to their backups.

There hasn't been one upgrade that hasn't changed one noticeable thing or another within the cardspace stuff. This I have to say was the worst upgrade. They could have at least provided some way to restore existing infocards.

Anonymous said...

Very nice. You might consider pointing out that the parsed information on the cards will now available to you, and will be going across the Internet in the clear.

cmort said...

Good point.

The service is available over our secure port as well: https://xmldap.org/sts/decrypt

Anonymous said...

I'm using the RTM version on Vista and I'm getting an error. Is this known?

System does not support the specified encoding. Error processing resource 'https://xmldap.org/sts/decrypt'. Line 1, Positi...

cmort said...

Hi Sam - your error got cutoff...