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Question:

digital certificates format

Mar 16 '13 at 14:08

Hi,, I'm practicing some of the "Digital Certificates" method, and i was woundering what is the differenc between the PFX, .cer, .DER format? So, i was woundering which one to use?, and is it posssible to export a digital certificate from a client to a server in a client/server network?

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Answer

Part 1 of your question - it's a big topic, but Wikipedia has some good reading explaining the differences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.509

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKCS_12

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguished_Encoding_Rules#CER_encoding

For Part 2 - yes it is possible to pass any arbitrary data from one computer to another on a network. How to do so depends on your programming language, network type (i.e. knowing what protocols are available), etc... Again, another big topic, but really we'd need to know more information about what you've tried, what language you are using, etc...

One possibility would be to use the ChilkatSocket object to transfer a certificate over TCP/IP, then on the server side import it into the server computer's certificate store.