X.509 certificate overview + status

[Eric Murray]

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 05:35:20PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> Travis wrote:
> > 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.
 

openssl will print certs in a more human readable but
slightly less complete format than dumpasn1:

% openssl x509 -text < cert

dumpasn1 does not read PEM, so you need to do

% openssl enc -d -c < cert > cert.der; dumpasn1 cert.der


It's a little old but RFC3280 is the most concise
and easiest to understand description of X.509 et. al.
that I have found.


Eric

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