CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#web-servicesx509certificate
Ebikeneser
Ebikeneser

Reputation: 2364

X509 Certificate multi-passwords?

I would like to know if x509 certificate's password allows multi-passwords per certificate - or just one?

And if it is possible, what scenario would it be applied?

Thanks for your time.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 452

Answers (2)

sarnold
sarnold

Reputation: 104080

Because GnuPG is easily available to me, it'd be my tool of choice; each admin would create a public/private key pair and export the public portion:

gpg --gen-key
gpg --export --armor [keyid] > key_file_[admin_name]

Import all the public keys into the keyring of whoever 'owns' the unencrypted x509 cert:

cat key_file_* | gpg --import

Then encrypt the cert with all the keys:

gpg -r keyid1 -r keyid2 -r keyid3 ... -o encrypted_cert -e plaintext_cert

Now encrypted_cert can be decrypted by whoever has one of the private keys and that private key's passphrase:

gpg encrypted_cert

PGP could also do the job, and probably with only slight modifications to the commands here.

Because all this is doing is encrypting a single symmetric key multiple times, once to each public key (and storing the results in a file format prepared to handle multiple copies of the encrypted symmetric key), it would be easy enough to re-implement in whatever language you'd like, if your trial wrappers work well enough.

Upvotes: 2

Ladislav Mrnka
Ladislav Mrnka

Reputation: 364369

It allows just one password and it is used to secure private key in the certificate. If you want to access private key you must provide a password.

Upvotes: 1

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