Tag: Cryptography

Convert JKS and P12 to Crt and Key files with OpenSSL

Mohit GoyalLeave a comment

PKCS#12 is a successor to Microsoft’s PFX format. It defines an archive file format for storing many cryptography objects as a single file. It is commonly used to bundle a private key with its X509 certificate or to bundle all the members of a chain of trusted certificates, starting from the root certificate authority. The files PFX (.pfx) and PKCS#12 (.p12), including terms, are somewhat used interchangeably and refer to same standard.

PKCS#12 are normally generated using OpenSSL, which is an open-source tool. We can use the same tool to convert JKS, which is Java keystore and PKCS#12 certs to crt and key files.

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Store the app secrets in Azure Key Vault and use during Azure Pipelines

Mohit Goyal5 Comments

You can easily store your environment related secrets in the Azure Pipelines releases as variables and mark them as secrets which will encrypt and hide them. So anyone having access to the release definition would be not able to view them. Most of the times, it suffices as once set, they become encrypted and can not be viewed in text form.

However, sometimes it may happen that the person who keeps the secret would not be the same person as who is creating the release definition. Think of that as a way of segregating the responsibilities between the two. Also, it may be possible that the person who has provisioned the environment is not comfortable to share the secrets with anyone in plain text. After all, the best way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone about it. This is where the Azure Key Vault fits in very nicely. It can be used to store and transfer the secrets/certificates needed for your environment in a secure way.
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Use SSL Certificates for Dotnet Core Application in Docker Containers

Mohit Goyal3 Comments

Using SSL to secure incoming and outgoing traffic from your server is always recommended. When you are developing locally or testing on a server, whether it is Windows or Macintosh or some distribution of Linux like CentOS, fedora, Ubuntu etc, its easy to put the certificate in one of the local directories and then ask server to use the same. However this becomes a little bit different if you are using Containers. Since Docker is the most popular container technology, it has become almost synonymous with containers. When using containers, you can many choices:
1) Map a local volume containing certificate files to the container and then refer to it from inside container
2) Copy certificate directly inside Container during image build process and then refer to it Read More »

Use OpenSSL to work with SSL Certificates, CSR and Private Keys

Mohit Goyal1 Comment

OpenSSL is a robust, commercial-grade, and full-featured toolkit on the Linux that can be used for a large variety of tasks related to Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols. It is also a general purpose cryptography library. It is licensed under an Apache-style license, which basically means that you are free to get and use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes subject to some simple license conditions.

It is already installed out of the box on the most linux distributions or available in the trusted package repositories. OpenSSL has been kind of standard in the open source domain to work with SSL and TLS protocols. If for some reason, it is not already installed, you can install it by using your distribution specific commands.

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