Storing Personal Certificate with Its Keys

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟Storing Personal Certificate with Its Keys

This section provides a tutorial example on how to merge a personal certificate with its private-public key pair in a KeyStore file, which needs to be converted in a PKCS12 file, because most PKI applications can only import PKCS12 files.

Now I need to merge the signed certificate with the corresponding private-public key pair in the KeyStore file.

1. View my personal certificate:

herong> keytool -printcert \
   -file herong_yang_yahoo_com.pem

Owner: EMAILADDRESS=herong_yang@yahoo.com, CN=CAcert WoT User
Issuer: EMAILADDRESS=support@cacert.org, CN=CA Cert Signing Authority,
   OU=http://www.cacert.org, O=Root CA
...

Noticed that CAcert.org has change the CN field to "CAcert WoT User" and put my email address into an EMAILADDRESS field.

2. Import the CAcert.org root certificate first:

herong> keytool -importcert -keystore herong.jks \
   -storepass HerongJKS -alias cacertsigningauthority \
   -file CACertSigningAuthority.crt

3. Import my personal certificate signed by CAcert.org together with its private-public key pair:

herong> keytool -importcert -keystore herong.jks \
   -storepass HerongJKS -alias herongyang@yahoo.com \
   -file herong_yang_yahoo_com.pem

4. Export my personal certificate with its private-public key pair:

herong> keytool -importkeystore \
   -srckeystore herong.jks -srcstoretype jks -srcstorepass HerongJKS \
   -srcalias herong_yang@yahoo.com -srckeypass HerongJKS \
   -destkeystore personal.p12 -deststoretype pkcs12 \
   -deststorepass HerongP12 -destkeypass HerongP12

Now my personal certificate with its private-public key pair is stored in a PKCS12 file, personal.p12, ready to be imported into any PKI client applications.