GEN - Couldn't acquire cryptographic context (activation)
Brian Donahue
Posts: 6,590 Bronze 1
Most of Red Gate's software requires activation over the Internet in order to register the software when it's been purchased so that it no longer operates in 'demonstration' mode. Part of the activation requires the decryption of some data. The activation process uses the Windows CryptoAPI.
In some circumstances during activation, you could get an error:
Possible causes for the error are (yet unidentified) Microsoft security updates and being a non-administrative user that is not the same user as the one who originally installed our software. A local machine administrator should not get this error unless the rights to the machine key store were specifically revoked (either by an administrator or a security update).
Since Red Gate's activation uses the machine keystore to find a key to encrypt or decrypt data with, the problem can most likely be solved by making sure that your security account has read-write access to %allusersprofile%\application data\microsoft\crypto\RSA\machinekeys. If you need to change this, you'll need to log off and back on in order for it to take effect.
In some circumstances during activation, you could get an error:
CryptoAPI cryptographic service provider (CSP) for this implementation could not be acquired
Possible causes for the error are (yet unidentified) Microsoft security updates and being a non-administrative user that is not the same user as the one who originally installed our software. A local machine administrator should not get this error unless the rights to the machine key store were specifically revoked (either by an administrator or a security update).
Since Red Gate's activation uses the machine keystore to find a key to encrypt or decrypt data with, the problem can most likely be solved by making sure that your security account has read-write access to %allusersprofile%\application data\microsoft\crypto\RSA\machinekeys. If you need to change this, you'll need to log off and back on in order for it to take effect.
