Converting PKCS#12 certificate into PEM using OpenSSL

Question

Try:

openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.crt.pem -clcerts -nokeys
openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.key.pem -nocerts -nodes

After that you have:

• certificate in newfile.crt.pem
• private key in newfile.key.pem

To put the certificate and key in the same file without a password, use the following, as an empty password will cause the key to not be exported:

openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.pem -nodes

Or, if you want to provide a password for the private key, omit -nodes and input a password:

openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.pem

If you need to input the PKCS#12 password directly from the command line (e.g. a script), just add -passin pass:${PASSWORD}:

openssl pkcs12 -in path.p12 -out newfile.crt.pem -clcerts -nokeys -passin 'pass:P@s5w0rD'

You just need to supply a password. You can do it within the same command line with the following syntax:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in "path.p12" -out "newfile.pem" -passin pass:[password]

You will then be prompted for a password to encrypt the private key in your output file. Include the "nodes" option in the line above if you want to export the private key unencrypted (plaintext):

openssl pkcs12 -export -in "path.p12" -out "newfile.pem" -passin pass:[password] -nodes

More info: http://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/pkcs12.html

If you can use Python, it is even easier if you have the pyopenssl module. Here it is:

from OpenSSL import crypto

# May require "" for empty password depending on version

with open("push.p12", "rb") as file:
    p12 = crypto.load_pkcs12(file.read(), "my_passphrase")

# PEM formatted private key
print crypto.dump_privatekey(crypto.FILETYPE_PEM, p12.get_privatekey())

# PEM formatted certificate
print crypto.dump_certificate(crypto.FILETYPE_PEM, p12.get_certificate())

I had a PFX file and needed to create KEY file for NGINX, so I did this:

openssl pkcs12 -in file.pfx -out file.key -nocerts -nodes

Then I had to edit the KEY file and remove all content up to -----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----. After that NGINX accepted the KEY file.

There is a free and open-source GUI tool KeyStore Explorer to work with crypto key containers. Using it you can export a certificate or private key into separate files or convert the container into another format (jks, pem, p12, pkcs12, etc)