Creating a PKCS-12 Formatted Certificate File (Linux Systems Only)

A PKCS12-formatted certificate file can be created using Linux system with OpenSSL. To create a PKCS-12 formatted certificate file, one needs to have two main components of the certificate:

• Private key (typically a file with .key extension or the word key in the filename)
• Certificate with a public key (typically a file with .crt extension or the word cert as part of filename).

For example, the Apache HTTP server on Linux has its private key and certificate in these locations:

• /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/server.key
• /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt/server.crt

With these two files available, run the following command:

openssl pkcs12 -export -out out.p12 -inkey server.key -in server.crt

In this example out.p12 become the PKCS-12 formatted certificate file and server.key and server.crt are the PEM-formatted private key and the certificate file respectively.

After running the openssl command, you are prompted for the password to protect/encrypted the file. After choosing the password, the creation of the PKCS-12-formatted certificate file is complete, and it can be imported into the appliance.