How do I generate a pfx file from PEM?

Question

I have a bunch of.Pem files.

One is (as far as I can tell) the CACert

mycacert.pem

the other is the certificate

mycert.pem

and finally what I am led to believe is the key file which is confusingly called the same as the certificate (but for this example I will call it something different)

key.pem

How do I form a PFX file from these?

I have tried to run the following command

openssl pkey -in C:\Temp\key.pem -out C:\Temp\my.key

however I get the following error

unable to load key 2147581984:error:0909006C:PEM routines:get_name:no start line:crypto/pem/pem_lib.c:745:Expecting: ANY PRIVATE KEY

If I open the file in notepad I see the following

-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- many characters -----END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST-----

Basically I just need to create a pfx from the files I have but I seem to need a *.key file, a *.crt file and another *.crt file for the CACert, non of which I have.

One more thing to note. The two certificate pem files contain multiple certificates in each.

Answer 1

The command you are looking for is:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in cert.pem -inkey key.pem -out pkcs12.pfx -certfile cacert.pem

Where cert.pem is your certificate, key.pem is the private key, cacert.pem is the CA certificate and pkcs12.pfx is the pkcs12 file that will be created.

The command may asks for a password to decrypt the private key and will ask for a new password to encrypt the private key inside the pkcs12.

You can find the openssl pkcs12 command documentation, here .