First published on MSDN on Apr 28, 2017
Recently, I have assisted a Premier customer who installed a new certificate on Windows Server 2008 R2 but was unable to bind the certifi...
One easy method to identify if the certificate you have is associated with a Private Key is to open the certificate and check for the below mention under the General tab of the certificate. This will be present right below the Valid From section:
Another easy method is to check the extension of the certificate file that you have.
Certificates can have any one of the below extensions:
*.PFX or *.P12 - Personal Information Exchange Format- This format supports storage of private and public keys and all certificates in the path. Certificates with private keys would have the .PFX or .P12 format. *.CER or *.CRT - Base64-encoded or DER-encoded binaryX.509 Certificate This format does not support storage of private keys.
*.PEM - Privacy Enhanced Mail This is X. 509 certificate encoded in text (base64 and encrypted). This is similar to the .CER extension. This extension is also provided as some software needs a .PEM cert file. *.CRL - Certificate Revocation List Designates a certificate that has been revoked. *.CSR - Certificate Signing Request This file type is issued by applications to submit requests to a Certification Authority or CA. *.DER - DER-encoded binary X.509 Certificate Storage of a single certificate. This format does not support storage of private keys. *.P7B or *.P7R or *.SPC - Cryptographic Message Syntax Standard Supports storage of all certificates in path and does not store private keys.
Also, there are two ways in which certificate Authority can provide you the private key associated certificate. They can either provide the certificate in .PFX format directly (which means certificate is already bound with private key) or they can provide you the certificate and the key file separately (in this scenario, the certificate file will be in either of the formats- .cer, .crt. .pem, .p7b, etc.). There are multiple tools available which can be then used to bind the certificate with the provided key, to create a PFX file. One such open source tool which can be used is Open SSL.