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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">Glad I could help. To be honest, I had to play around with it for a bit before I remembered that RACF can export PEM-encoded PKCS#12, and how I had handled that the last time I went through this myself.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">Also, having experience with figuring out what a file is using openssl asn1parse definitely helps. The last time I taught a class on key and certificate handling, we did an entire exercise on this, because we're
always getting this sort of thing from customers. "Here's a zip with our key and certificate files", they say, and then there are files in it with names like "file0" and "key1", and it turns out "key1" is actually a certificate. Learning how to match private
keys to certificates is also very useful; I actually ended up giving one customer a script to do that, because they'd been copying things from machine to machine and had really confused the situation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">Someone needs to write a book like
<i>Surviving Cryptography with OpenSSL</i> that covers these things, along the lines of Ivan Ristić's
<i>OpenSSL Cookbook</i>. (I'd volunteer but to be honest it'd never get done.) I guess this sort of thing should go on the wiki; maybe some of it's there already.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">Anyway, back on the subject: I suppose technically this is not really PEM encoding, because the PEM delimiters lie. "----- BEGIN CERTIFICATE -----" claims that what follows is a Base64-encoded DER-encoded X.509
certificate, not a Base64-encoded DER-encoded PKCS#12 structure. Those are rather different things. I suspect RACF supports this because 1) it was easy and 2) it's convenient to have a text representation (that converts cleanly between EBCDIC and ASCII). But
it's not technically correct.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">That's probably why OpenSSL doesn't support it; fake-PEM-PKCS#12 is a RACF idiosyncracy, as far as I know. I'm guessing Windows just takes whatever's between the PEM delimiters, decodes the Base64, parses it
as ASN.1 DER, and then decides what to do.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">You could argue, by Postel's Interoperability Principle, that openssl should have a "-figure-out-the-format" option for every command that takes files. On the other hand, the Interoperability Principle is a security
risk; many vulnerabilities are eliminated simply by requiring inputs that satisfy the specification.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D">With a decent scripting language it's pretty easy to recognize one of these files and automatically extract it into something sensible.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Courier New";color:black">Michael Wojcik</span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;color:#1F497D">
<br>
</span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Courier New";color:black">Distinguished Engineer</span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;font-family:"Courier New";color:black">, Micro Focus</span><span style="font-size:9.0pt;color:#1F497D">
</span><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:#1F497D"><o:p> </o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif"">From:</span></b><span style="font-size:10.0pt;font-family:"Tahoma","sans-serif""> openssl-users [mailto:openssl-users-bounces@openssl.org]
<b>On Behalf Of </b>Gary L Peskin<br>
<b>Sent:</b> Monday, March 13, 2017 10:26<br>
<b>To:</b> openssl-users@openssl.org<br>
<b>Subject:</b> Re: [openssl-users] Cannot read exported PKCS12 cert and private key<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thanks VERY much Michael. That did the trick. This was a homegrown CA cert and I needed it to sign a certificate request for testing purposes.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I didn’t realize that the openssl pkcs12 utility didn’t support PEM encoding for input. I was a little confused I guess by the documentation which shows PEM encoding for “-in filename” but I see now that that’s for when exporting a PKCS#12
file, not for parsing one.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Thanks again for clearing this up. It’s weird that MS supports this input format but openssl does not. I thought openssl could do EVERYTHING.
<span style="font-family:"Segoe UI Symbol","sans-serif"">😊</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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