Formats of Digital Certificate and How to Change Them
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.
Read about – Cheap Code Signing Certificate
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.
Read About – SSL Certificate
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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