Cert Profiles and Sample Certs

The Higher Education PKI Activity Group (HEPKI) has gathered certificate profiles which are under development at several institutions in an effort to harmonize these efforts.

They are presented using the formats described below.

Certificates and Profiles

• CREN institutional root CA (XLS)
• Columbia University (DLF) (XLS)
• Georgetown University (TXT)
• MIT: Help page; XLS, PEM, TXT
• SURFnet/Gigaport (PKI Info, PEM) and apps, etc
• University of California (XLS)
• University of Michigan (XLS)
• University of Virginia (TXT)
• University of Wisconsin (XLS)

Certificate Formats

Here is a brief description of each format.

• PEM - an actual X.509 certificate, DER and Base64 encoded into a text file. This is the canonical form for a certificate.
• TXT - Plain text dump of the various fields of a certificate (generated, e.g. by OpenSSL or iPlanet)
• XML - an XML-based certificate format used by IBM's XML Security Suite which can be reliably transformed back into the canonical DER-encoded form, and also into HTML via XSL. Here is an example.
• HTML - produced from the XML format by IBM's XML Security Suite according to this XSLT stylesheet. Here is an example.
• XLS - an Excel layout promulgated by Bob Moskowitz, which specifies a certificate profile. It includes examples and annotations about how an institution plans to deal with each field in a typical certificate.