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Hello everyone!

Yesterday I pushed new PSPKI release with version number v3.3.0. New version is even more stable and even more powerful. More technical change list is moved to dedicated article: Release notes for PSPKI v3.3.0. In this (and, possibly next) blog post I would like to outline major changes/improvements to this release.

ADCS Database row presentation

I bet that ADCS database access is one of the most popular features people love in my module. And there are reasons: I put a lot of efforts to simplify access to CA database and provide flexible filter options. For example, get certificates that will expire in next 30 days:


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Hello S-1-1-0!

In previous post we gave an introduction into techniques to work with certificate revocation lists in PowerShell. We explored common steps to read CRL’s basic information, CRL extensions and revoked certificate collection. Today I will discuss about CRL handy shortcuts and signature validation.

Get CRL next publication date and number

In some environments, it is impossible to automatically copy CRLs from CA server to CRL distribution points or there is a scenario when PKI administrators run custom scripts to monitor CRL health status at CRL distribution points and update them if they are about to expire. For such purposes I maintain two shortcut methods to quickly identify required values.

CRL validity is determined by a NextUpdate field. If the current time passes that timestamp, the CRL is considered expired. To provide better validity handling, Microsoft use their own Next CRL Publish CRL extension. This extension contains a date/time value at which CA will issue new CRL. This value (when present) is always set prior to value in NextUpdate field to provide a time window to replicate newly published CRL across all distribution points prior existing CRLs expire. I have a good article on this subject: How ThisUpdate, NextUpdate and NextCRLPublish are calculated (v2). However, Next CRL Publish extension is presented in CRLs issued by Microsoft CAs and is absent in 3rd party CAs, as the result, next CRL publication date is determined solely by Next Update field. Moreover, there might be a case when CA is in the decommission process and issues its last CRL which is supposed to be valid infinitely.


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Hello everyone!

Today I would like to summarize techniques on working with X.509 certificate revocation lists (CRL) in PowerShell. There are a lot of examples in my weblog, but most of this information is provided as context-specific addition to work in a given article’s context. Before talking about the subject, I’d like to put few words about the reason of this blog post and why it is written in that way.

Motivation

As PowerShell evolves, it starts to cover more and new areas. And this process continues since PowerShell birth (in 2006). Systems administrators become more critical to script functionality. Previously, if something was not doable at all, we skipped that thing. With PowerShell we are able to do much more things. Maybe, not natively, maybe not in an elegant manner (say, through complex parsing), maybe very ugly, but we can do that right now. If community is interested in some area, they will develop a framework to make things easier and available to everyone.

One big area I’m interesting in is public key infrastructure, CryptoAPI, certificates and everything related to them. This happened several years ago (I recall it was in 2009) when I already was a passionate PowerShell enthusiast. Unfortunately, I realized that PowerShell has very-very basic support of certificate-related stuff. Mostly, this is due to poor support from underlying .NET platform. As the result, I attempted to start my big project to integrate cryptography into PowerShell through PS module and standalone scripts. Apparently, I was one of the first PS enthusiasts who started cryptography integration into PowerShell. I made huge work during these 7 years, went through tons of mistakes, bad choices, misunderstandings, trials and probes. It took 7 years and still continues. As of now, I have developed one of the best PowerShell module to work with PKI I’m aware of: PowerShell PKI. It is not just a module, it is a whole framework, which offers additional functionality through .NET-style objects and methods you can call from PS console. All this makes me confident in PowerShell PKI area.


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Hello everyone!

Some time ago I wrote a script that converts PEM file to CryptoAPI compatible format: How to convert PEM file to a CryptoAPI compatible format. The script involves some non-PowerShell commands (certutil) which associates private key with a certificate instance. I received several feedback comments about avoiding certutil in favor of native PowerShell/.NET managed code. In this post I want to show some code that eliminates certutil from the script.

Just to recall what we generally do when converting PEM to X509Certificate2/PFX:

  • Read the certificate information from PEM file and instantiate a X509Certificate2 object;
  • Read PKCS#1 or PKCS#8 private key;
  • Convert PKCS#1/PKCS#9 private key to CryptoAPI PRIVATEKEYBLOB;
  • Associate PRIVATEKYEBLOB with an X509Certificate2 instance.

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Hello S-1-1-0, it’s time for another blog post. Another PowerShell and CryptoAPI blog post.

Identifying the problem

Recently I had a trivial (or non-trivial?) challenge: read multiple signatures from signed files. Usually files have only one signature:

image


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