Re: Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook

Kriston J. Rehberg (kriston@ibm.net)
Mon, 8 Jun 1998 13:08:20 -0400

• Next message: Mark A. Herschberg: "Cyberlock"
• Previous message: Kriston J. Rehberg: "RE: Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook"
• In reply to: Ian Clysdale: "RE: Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook"
• Next in thread: Ian Clysdale: "RE: Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook"

Actually, after reading Peter Guttman's article about the file format
used by MSIE to protect the keys, I think I'd rather not have that
conversion program after all.

Thanks anyway!

(heheh)

Kris

PS...Thanks for the pointers. For those who haven't read it, the
article is at http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/breakms.txt

Kriston J. Rehberg writes:
>Okay, having discovered this, are there any programs to convert the
>keys from one format to another, or are the formats created in such a
>way that Netscape and/or MSIE have to create the files themselves?
>
>Kris
>
>
>Ian Clysdale writes:
>>No, Netscape and IE use slightly different versions of the PKCS-12 spec.
>>
>>I believe that it has to do with the hashing performed on the stored
>>certificates - Peter Gutman wrote a very indepth article on IE's behaviour
>>in this case a couple months ago that people probably have copies of still
>>floating around.
>>
>> ian
>>
>>
>>> ----------
>>> From: kriston@ibm.net[SMTP:kriston@ibm.net]
>>> Sent: Friday, June 05, 1998 9:24 AM
>>> To: CodherPlunks@toad.com
>>> Subject: Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook
>>>
>>> Hi, I have a personal certificate that I created with Netscape
>>> Communicator. I have followed the instructions to export the
>>> certificate to a file, and then tried to use MSIE 4/Outlook98 to import
>>> the certificate back into those programs and it always says "The file
>>> is in an invalid format".
>>>
>>> What am I doing wrong? Aren't you supposed to be able to convert
>>> certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook? Have these two
>>> programs become incompatible? I understand that this used to work,
>>> since exporting the cert exports both the private and public keys in
>>> an encrypted format. One of either Netscape or MSIE has changed
>>> something to break this code.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Kris
>>>
>>> PS...Sorry if this is slightly off-topic!
>>>
>>> --
>>> Kriston J. Rehberg
>>> AOL: Kriston http://kriston.net/
>>>
>>
>
>--
>Kriston J. Rehberg
>AOL: Kriston http://kriston.net/
>
>

-- 
Kriston J. Rehberg
AOL: Kriston                        http://kriston.net/

• Next message: Mark A. Herschberg: "Cyberlock"
• Previous message: Kriston J. Rehberg: "RE: Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook"
• In reply to: Ian Clysdale: "RE: Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook"
• Next in thread: Ian Clysdale: "RE: Personal Certificates between Netscape and MSIE/Outlook"