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Our Customer has an Enterprise Distribution certificate. We are signing their Apps and distribute them to their devices via Airwatch MDM.

Their Enterprise Distribution certificate is about to expire in January 2016. I have generated a new Enterprise Distribution certificate valid till December 2018. With this new Enterprise Distribution certificate I was able to generate a new Provisioning Profile.

Creating new Provisioning Profile

I'm able to exchange the Provisioning Profile of all Apps with Airwatch without having to touch them.

However as the certificate has changed, is there a way I do not have to resign the apps with the new certificate? Is it possible to generate a new certificate with the same old private key?

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No - spoofing the key signature would be equivalent to bypassing the chain of trust entirely. You'd probably be able to sell that exploit to bad actors and governments for a lot of money.

You will need to re-sign the apps and likely increment the version numbers on them before pushing them out since Apple doesn't re-sign things for you dynamically as they do with App store downloads.

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  • Would it be possible to keep the same version number if I delete the app before? F.ex. there is app abc.ipa v4.2 signed with the old certificate. I delete this app from Airwatch and from all devices. Then I push out abc.ipa v4.2 signed with the new certificate.
    – mles
    Dec 19, 2015 at 12:37
  • Sure @mles - but you'll need to manage things and it is more confusing. I would bump the most minor version so that all your reporting tools can tell you which devices have the old app and the new one. You could also just put that burden on the users - if their app stops working they could be instructed to delete it and reinstall the "same version".
    – bmike ♦
    Dec 19, 2015 at 14:25
  • We did bump the most minor version with the resigned version with the new certificate. There were some apps we couldn't update in time. The users had to manually delete it and then install the new version. Apparently there is a bug that iOS marks the complete App as unhealthy once there is an version that is expired.
    – mles
    Mar 22, 2016 at 20:58

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