Formats of Digital Certificate and How to Change Them

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What is a digital certificate?

The validity of a device, server, or user by utilizing encryption and the public key infrastructure (PKI) is confirmed by a digital certificate file or alternatively, an electronic password. To make sure that only reliable people and devices may connect to their networks, organizations can utilize digital certificate authentication. A secure sockets layer certificate, or SSL certificate, is another common use for digital certificates. It allows a web browser to confirm the validity of a website.

The digital certificate provides precise information about the certificate owner’s identity and the certifying authority. Digital certificates can be obtained or converted in a variety of forms. Different certificate types, on the other hand, offer neither advantages or disadvantages.It all relies on the format requirements of the certificate for the programme that will use it.

Certificate encoding schemes and extensions include:

Binary:

DER: .der, .cer

PKCS#12: .p12, pfx

Base64:

PKCS#7 .p7c, .p7b

PEM: .crt, .ca-bundle, .pem

Components of a digital certificate

A digital certificate is composed of four components. Owner’s Distinguished Name is at the top, followed by Owner’s Public Key, Issuer’s (CA) Distinguished Name, and Issuer’s Signature.

The digital certificate’s contents are further described in the following list:

Owner’s Distinguished Name (ODN): It is a combination of the owner’s common name and context (position) in the directory tree.

Owner’s Public Key: The receivers decrypt data using the owner’s public key.

Alternate Name for the Subject: This can be an identification like an IP address, email address, fully qualified domain name, etc.

Issue: Digital certificates are issued with an issuance date.

Expiration date: Date on which the digital certificate expires.

Name distinguished by the Issuer: Name distinguished by the Certification Authority.

Digital Signature of the Issuer: A certificate’s issuer’s digital signature is used to verify it.

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Types of extensions: Different formats

PEM

A PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) file is a certificate file with Base64 encoding that is used to confirm the security of websites. It could include a private key, a certificate from a certificate authority (CA) for the server, or other certificates from the trust chain. PEM files are frequently imported from a Unix-based Apache Web server and are compatible with OpenSSL applications.

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A text editor can be used to see the contents of a PEM file. There are one or more headers in the file that list the data they contain. The “—-BEGIN CERTIFICATE—-” and “—-END CERTIFICATE—-” statements are present in a certificate’s PEM file.

Private keys and certificates can be sequentially stored in a PEM file. PEM files are often used by Linux and Unix-based web servers. PEM files often include the following extensions:.cer,.pem,.crt, and.key .

DEM

A certificate file in binary format is known as a DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) file. You must view the file using a text editor to distinguish between DER.cer and PEM.cer since DER files can either end in.der or.cer. A DER file shouldn’t contain any BEGIN/END statements since doing so will alter the binary data.

Both private keys and digital certificates can be encoded using the DER format. Java systems frequently employ DER files. The.cer and.der file extensions are frequently used for DER files.

PKCS#7

A certificate file that is Base64-encoded is PKCS#7. Private keys cannot be kept in this format. The PKCS#7 file format may only be used to hold digital certificates and Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL).

The “—-BEGIN PKCS7—-” and “—-END PKCS7—-” phrases are found in PKCS#7 files. The.p7b and.p7c file extensions are frequently used with PKCS#7 files. These files are often used by Microsoft Windows and Java Tomcat systems.

PKCS#8

Private keys and encrypted private key information can both be included in this format. It often uses a DER or PEM structure, which is subsequently encrypted, to store the data in base64 encoded form. The typical ending is.p8.

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