Languages

One thing people tend to ignore when creating applications is that once they are on the internet, anyone can download them. This means that potential end users may not speak English. In order to maximise sales, multilingual applications are pretty much a requirement. A quick and easy way to set up multilingual applications is to create a language definition file. Each entry is given a token to identify it across languages. This token can be in any language, but obviously an English speaking developer would be best to use English.

For example, the following might be part of a German language definition:

yes Ja
no Nein
cancel Abbrechen
error Fehler
register_complete Danke für die Registrierung.

This allows the developer to parse the language file into a token-indexed array such as a Dictionary collection. In order to run on a particular language, the language definition file is loaded into the application and the code uses the individual tokens to display the message.

MessageBox.Show(Language["register_complete"]);

However, when we're working with an anti-malware application, we need to consider security as well. What if an attacker were to modify the language definition file to show a different message and convince the user to do something detrimental? As such, we need to secure the language file with a digital signature to prove its authenticity. This can be done with the same RSA keypair we use for storing definitions.