The pkcs12 command allows PKCS#12 files (sometimes referred to as
PFX files) to be created and parsed. PKCS#12 files are used by several
programs including Netscape, MSIE and MS Outlook.
There are a lot of options the meaning of some depends of whether a PKCS#12 file
is being created or parsed. By default a PKCS#12 file is parsed. A PKCS#12
file can be created by using the -export option (see below).
Prompt for separate integrity and encryption passwords: most software
always assumes these are the same so this option will render such
PKCS#12 files unreadable. Cannot be used in combination with the options
-password, -passin (if importing) or -passout (if exporting).
The filename to read certificates and private keys from, standard input by
default. They must all be in PEM format. The order doesn't matter but one
private key and its corresponding certificate should be present. If additional
certificates are present they will also be included in the PKCS#12 file.
File to read private key from. If not present then a private key must be present
in the input file.
If no engine is used, the argument is taken as a file; if an engine is
specified, the argument is given to the engine as a key identifier.
This specifies the "friendly name" for other certificates. This option may be
used multiple times to specify names for all certificates in the order they
appear. Netscape ignores friendly names on other certificates whereas MSIE
displays them.
If this option is present then an attempt is made to include the entire
certificate chain of the user certificate. The standard CA store is used
for this search. If the search fails it is considered a fatal error.
Encrypt the certificate using triple DES, this may render the PKCS#12
file unreadable by some "export grade" software. By default the private
key is encrypted using triple DES and the certificate using 40 bit RC2
unless RC2 is disabled in which case triple DES is used.
These options allow the algorithm used to encrypt the private key and
certificates to be selected. Any PKCS#5 v1.5 or PKCS#12 PBE algorithm name
can be used (see NOTES section for more information). If a cipher name
(as output by the list-cipher-algorithms command is specified then it
is used with PKCS#5 v2.0. For interoperability reasons it is advisable to only
use PKCS#12 algorithms.
Specifies that the private key is to be used for key exchange or just signing.
This option is only interpreted by MSIE and similar MS software. Normally
"export grade" software will only allow 512 bit RSA keys to be used for
encryption purposes but arbitrary length keys for signing. The -keysig
option marks the key for signing only. Signing only keys can be used for
S/MIME signing, authenticode (ActiveX control signing) and SSL client
authentication, however, due to a bug only MSIE 5.0 and later support
the use of signing only keys for SSL client authentication.
These options affect the iteration counts on the MAC and key algorithms.
Unless you wish to produce files compatible with MSIE 4.0 you should leave
these options alone.
To discourage attacks by using large dictionaries of common passwords the
algorithm that derives keys from passwords can have an iteration count applied
to it: this causes a certain part of the algorithm to be repeated and slows it
down. The MAC is used to check the file integrity but since it will normally
have the same password as the keys and certificates it could also be attacked.
By default both MAC and encryption iteration counts are set to 2048, using
these options the MAC and encryption iteration counts can be set to 1, since
this reduces the file security you should not use these options unless you
really have to. Most software supports both MAC and key iteration counts.
MSIE 4.0 doesn't support MAC iteration counts so it needs the -nomaciter
option.
A file or files containing random data used to seed the random number
generator.
Multiple files can be specified separated by an OS-dependent character.
The separator is ; for MS-Windows, , for OpenVMS, and : for
all others.
CA storage as a directory. This directory must be a standard certificate
directory: that is a hash of each subject name (using x509 -hash) should be
linked to each certificate.
Although there are a large number of options most of them are very rarely
used. For PKCS#12 file parsing only -in and -out need to be used
for PKCS#12 file creation -export and -name are also used.
If none of the -clcerts, -cacerts or -nocerts options are present
then all certificates will be output in the order they appear in the input
PKCS#12 files. There is no guarantee that the first certificate present is
the one corresponding to the private key. Certain software which requires
a private key and certificate and assumes the first certificate in the
file is the one corresponding to the private key: this may not always
be the case. Using the -clcerts option will solve this problem by only
outputting the certificate corresponding to the private key. If the CA
certificates are required then they can be output to a separate file using
the -nokeys -cacerts options to just output CA certificates.
The -keypbe and -certpbe algorithms allow the precise encryption
algorithms for private keys and certificates to be specified. Normally
the defaults are fine but occasionally software can't handle triple DES
encrypted private keys, then the option -keypbe PBE-SHA1-RC2-40 can
be used to reduce the private key encryption to 40 bit RC2. A complete
description of all algorithms is contained in the pkcs8 manual page.
Prior 1.1 release passwords containing non-ASCII characters were encoded
in non-compliant manner, which limited interoperability, in first hand
with Windows. But switching to standard-compliant password encoding
poses problem accessing old data protected with broken encoding. For
this reason even legacy encodings is attempted when reading the
data. If you use PKCS#12 files in production application you are advised
to convert the data, because implemented heuristic approach is not
MT-safe, its sole goal is to facilitate the data upgrade with this
utility.
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Licensed under the OpenSSL license (the "License"). You may not use
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