Exporting a digital certificate to a PFX file

• Download CExpPFX.zip-19.99KB

Introduction

A certificate is a set of data that identifies an entity. A trusted organization assigns a certificate to an individual or an entity that associates a public key with the individual. The individual or entity to whom a certificate is issued is called the subject of that certificate. The trusted organization that issues the certificate is a certification authority (CA) and is known as the certificate's issuer. A trustworthy CA will only issue a certificate after verifying the identity of the certificate's subject.

PFX files

A PFX file contains all the information that makes up an X.509 Digital Certificate that can be to authenticate a person or device, such as a computer or Web server.

You can export your PFX files programmatically using Microsoft Cryptography API which is an application programming interface included with Microsoft Windows operating systems that provides services to enable developers to secure Windows-based applications using cryptography. It is a set of dynamically-linked libraries that provides an abstraction layer which isolates programmers from the code used to encrypt the data.

Source code

The attached source code exports all your certificates including your private key from your personal certificate store.

CExpCertificate methods:

•  BOOL ExportCertificate(wchar_t* szPassword) - szPassword represent a  password  used to encrypt and verify the PFX packet.
• VOID WritePFX(CRYPT_DATA_BLOB* pPFX, char* szOutputFile) – used to save your pfx file on your hdd.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Intelliproject Open License (IPOL)

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