In an X509 certificate, the cRLDistributionPoints extension provides a mechanism for the certificate validator to retrieve a CRL(Certificate Revocation List) which can be used to verify whether the given certificate is revoked.  A cRLDistributionPoints extension can contain one or more DistributionPoints where the CRL can be retrieved from. Each DistributionPoint consists of three fields,each of which is optional:distributionPoint : it contains either a SEQUENCE of general names or a single value. One distributionPoint can contain one or more general names which show w...

A certificate is often used to prove the identity of a server. The certificate will contain information such as the subject and issuer of the certificate. It will also contain the validation date of the certificate. A certificate is often exported to an external cert file which is transferred over the internet. We will often see its use in SSL communication which provides secure communication between two entities.In this post, we will show how to read the data from an external certificate file and generate a X509 certificate object with the data. This object can then be used to conduct other o...

This is the first post in this series which I will show you how to generate SSL certificate in Java programmatically. Certificates are frequently used in SSL communication which requires the authentication of server to client. This is to make the client to trust that the server is actually the one it claims. Certificates are really important on the Internet. All HTTPS communications on the Internet need the server side to present their certificates signed by trusted CAs.The basic flow of a request generation is that we first use some tool to generate the certificate request, this certificate r...