Any way to shorten the Signer ID

[dspencer42]

Would there be any way to shorten the Rile ID's generated by the tool?

Size is an important consideration for these policy files and at a length of 80 characters for the Signer or File ID's, these end up much larger than what the MS App Control Wizard creates, although this is a significantly better tool.

[HotCakeX]

Hi, the length of the IDs does not have any effect on the generated CIP file.

The app uses GUIDs to ensure uniqueness but that's just for the internal code and XML to CIP conversions to handle, users shouldn't worry about IDs or change them as they will all be converted to binary code in CIP file. So be sure that size will stay the same, you can try changing IDs and compare the sizes and you will see even the hashes of the generated CIP files will be the same.

[HotCakeX]

Though it is totally possible to shorten them, i just have to implement extra features for it, but first i'd wanna know if you have a specific need for shortening them now that i mentioned it won't change the generated CIP file size. Thanks

[dspencer42]

Completely understandable!

I was actually planning to do some testing that you just saved me regarding the file size of the XML vs the CIP to see if that ID would affect the file size after being converted to binary in the CIP.

My reasoning is that we load the files to our remote systems using Intune, and I believe that there is a file size limitation of... 800kb or something like that for loading the xml file into Intune. While we do have a little while before that would become an issue, because we don't load everything into the base policy... I just prefer to future-proof things to prevent surprise issues in the future as much as possible. Switching from using the MS Tool they have available for it to AppControl Manager resulted in a 48% increase in the file size generated.

I generally create individual XML files for each app's required rules, and then merge them all together (in groups depending on app type) every time to create the large Apps supplemental xml that we load into Intune for the actual policy. Doing it this way is a bit more work, but makes it much easier to update or remove an individual app down the road without keeping old garbage that's no longer needed.

[HotCakeX]

You can use AppContorl Manager to upload your policies, it converts them to CIP files before upload. Since you mentioned future proofing, if you decide to switch to Signed policies which are so much more secure, you will need to use CIP files since XML files cannot be signed, the app supports them too.

Policy Editor makes it easy to edit policies without using text editors, it will keep everything compliant: https://github.com/HotCakeX/Harden-Windows-Security/wiki/PolicyEditor

In the next update, i'll make the IDs use a single GUID instead of x2, that will cut the length of all IDs in half. I use x2 to avoid any possibility of generating duplicate GUIDs which technically should be very rare. After that you can simply load your existing policies in the Policy Editor or the Merge page to save them again and the new shorter IDs will be applied. Any new policies you will generate will have shorter IDs too.

If the online policy upload/deployment has any missing features that you need before you can start using it i can implement them too.

[dspencer42]

I appreciate you being willing to shorten those!

We aren't able to connect it to the tenant to allow the tool to upload for entirely non-technical reasons.

[HotCakeX]

I see, well if it's about trust then i can suggest code reviewing the app internally since it's open source (i've really added lots of comments in the code for everything) and i do publish it to Microsoft Store for verification and signing.

[HotCakeX]

Hi @dspencer42
I just released an update in Microsoft Store and GitHub that has the shortened IDs you requested ^^
https://github.com/HotCakeX/Harden-Windows-Security/releases/tag/AppControlManager.v.2.0.13.0