
In summary, there are four different ways to present certificates and their components:
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You can sometimes download them from CA websites. Certificate Authorities produce these as a way to de-authorize certificates before expiration. pem style certificates, this format has a defined way to include certification-path certificates. Java understands these natively, and often uses.
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keystore - Defined in RFC 2315 as PKCS number 7, this is a format used by Windows for certificate interchange. der) formatted file with a different extension, one that is recognized by Windows Explorer as a certificate, which. DER formatted files with a different extension. By default, Windows will export certificates as. pem ( openssl x509 -inform der -in r -out converted.pem). der - A way to encode ASN.1 syntax in binary, a. pem file with both public and private keys: openssl pkcs12 -in file-to-convert.p12 -out converted-file.pem -nodesĪ few other formats that show up from time to time: pem files, this container is fully encrypted. This is a password-protected container format that contains both public and private certificate pairs.

p12 - Originally defined by RSA in the Public-Key Cryptography Standards (abbreviated PKCS), the "12" variant was originally enhanced by Microsoft, and later submitted as RFC 7292. The rights on these files are very important, and some programs will refuse to load these certificates if they are set wrong. In Apache installs, this frequently resides in /etc/ssl/private. key - This is a (usually) PEM formatted file containing just the private-key of a specific certificate and is merely a conventional name and not a standardized one. The name is from Privacy Enhanced Mail (PEM), a failed method for secure email but the container format it used lives on, and is a base64 translation of the x509 ASN.1 keys. as used here) as the PKCS10 format can be translated into PEM. Confusingly, it may also encode a CSR (e.g.
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pem - Defined in RFC 1422 (part of a series from 1421 through 1424) this is a container format that may include just the public certificate (such as with Apache installs, and CA certificate files /etc/ssl/certs), or may include an entire certificate chain including public key, private key, and root certificates. The returned certificate is the public certificate (which includes the public key but not the private key), which itself can be in a couple of formats. These get signed by the CA and a certificate is returned.

It includes some/all of the key details of the requested certificate such as subject, organization, state, whatnot, as well as the public key of the certificate to get signed. The actual format is PKCS10 which is defined in RFC 2986. Some applications can generate these for submission to certificate-authorities. csr - This is a Certificate Signing Request. In the end, all of these are different ways to encode Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN.1) formatted data - which happens to be the format x509 certificates are defined in - in machine-readable ways.

SSL has been around for long enough you'd think that there would be agreed upon container formats.
