From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts

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Certificate formats

Certificate formats

From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-701) Cert Prep: 1 General Security Concepts

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Certificate formats

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Digital certificates come in a variety of different formats. Some of these are binary-based and some of them are text-based. Let's take a look at some common certificate formats. The most common format is the Distinguished Encoding Rules or DER format. This is a binary certificate format. So it appears like the nonsense that you see on the right side of the screen if you try to view the certificate. DER certificates are normally stored in files with the .DER, .CRT, or .CER extensions. The PEM certificate format is closely related to the DER format. PEM stands for Privacy Enhanced Mail, an older, secure email standard that's no longer used, but we still use the certificate format from that standard today for other purposes. PEM certificates are ASCII text versions of DER certificates, such as the one shown here. It's a lot more readable than the binary equivalent. You can easily convert between binary DER certificates and text-based PEM certificates using tools like OpenSSL. PEM…

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