X.509 certificate overview + status

[Marcus Brinkmann]

Travis wrote:
> Recently I set up certificates for my server's SSL, SMTP, IMAP, XMPP,
> and OpenVPN services.  Actually, I created my own CA for some of the
> certificates, and in other cases I used self-signed.  It took me
> substantially more time than I had anticipated, and I'm left with
> feelings of unease.

Welcome to the club!

> Further, trying to dig into ASN.1 was extremely difficult.  The specs
> are full of obtuse language, using terms like "object" without
> defining them first.  Are there any tools that will dump certificates
> in human-readable formats?  I would really like something that could
> take a PEM file of a cert and display it in XML or something of the
> sort.

Ubuntu comes with dumpasn1.  There are also quite a few libraries.

> I'm plowing through the O'Reilly OpenSSL book, but are there other
> resources out there that could help me, or others like me?

You should be aware of Peter Gutmann's style guide:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/x509guide.txt

Thanks,
Marcus

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