Application Signing is a mechanism whereby digital certificates are used to provide tamper proof information about how much an application can be trusted. Symbian's system-wide Platform Security model uses the information in the certificate to determine whether to grant access to sensitive APIs and restricted areas of the file system, and whether or not to display installation warnings.

Some phones, including most Nokia phones based on Symbian, do not permit unsigned applications to be installed.

Application developers can self sign applications by creating their own certificate. There are limitations, however, because self-signed applications are untrusted and can use only "user-grantable" capabilities. A security warning will be displayed upon installation to inform the user about what actions the application can do (based on its capabilities).

The default security settings on some phones, such as Nokia E-series phones, may prevent installation of self-signed packages. You can change the security settings on your phone if you wish to to install self signed applications.

© 2010 Symbian Foundation Limited. This document is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode for the full terms of the license.
Note that this content was originally hosted on the Symbian Foundation developer wiki.