如何将 PKCS#12 字符串转换为证书和 PrivateKey？

Question

I am receiving the following String from a certificate stored in Azure Key Vault. I am using the Secret API in order to retrieve both the certificate and the private key related to this cert.

Initially the certificate was uploaded using a.pfx file to Azure Key vault. Now I need to create a Certificate and a PrivateKey to allow client authentication to a 3rd party system and I am using the given String retrieved from the API, however I am note sure how to get around that in Java.

I took some hints from this link in C# however I am pretty certain that this method doesn't work like that in Java. In particular an X509Certificate or a Certificate in general doesn't hold any information about the PrivateKey in Java, unlike C#, and I am not sure how to extract that information from given String in Java.

This works as expected to retrieve the certificate from the String retrieved from the API

String secret = azureSecret.getValue();
byte[] certkey = Base64.getDecoder().decode(secret);
ByteArrayInputStream inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(certkey);
CertificateFactory cf = CertificateFactory.getInstance("X.509");
Certificate cert = cf.generateCertificate(inputStream);

The azureSecret.getValue() format is like the following however I am not sure how to get PrivateKey out of the given String

MIIKvgIBaaZd6Euf3EYwYdHrIIKYzCC...

Answer 1

YES, Java X509Certificate and Certificate is only the certificate. Instead use KeyStore which can contain multiple entries each of which is either a 'trusted' certificate (for someone else), or a privatekey plus certificate plus other chain cert(s) (if applicable) for yourself, or (not relevant here) a 'secret' (symmetric) key. PKCS12 is supported as one type of KeyStore along with others not relevant here, so after the base64-decoding you already have do something like:

KeyStore ks = KeyStore.getInstance("PKCS12");
ks.load(inputstreamfromvaultvalue, password);
// then
PrivateKey pkey = (PrivateKey) ks.getKey(alias, password);
// and
Certificate cert = ks.getCertificate(alias); // if you only need the leaf cert
// or
Certificate[] chain = ks.getCertificateChain(alias); // usually

But if you want to do client authentication in TLS/SSL (including HTTPS), you give the JSSE KeyManager the whole keystore object not the individual pieces (privatekey and certificates). Similarly to verify the peer in TLS/SSL, you give TrustManager a keystore containing trusted certificates, usually root CAs and often defaulted to a built-in set of public root CAs.