Certificate Revocation List

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File Format
Name Certificate Revocation List
Ontology
Extension(s) .crl, .pem

A Certificate Revocation List (CRL) is a cryptographically-signed list of certificates that a certificate authority has declared to be revoked.

A CRL file may be encoded in PEM format, DER format, or possibly some other format.

CRL files are becoming less widely-used, in favor of the OCSP protocol.

Contents

Identification

A PEM-encoded CRL file is plain text, with base64-encoded payload data. It contains a line that reads "-----BEGIN X509 CRL -----".

Examples

To view the contents of a PEM-encoded CRL file, using OpenSSL:

 openssl crl -noout -text -in example.crl

To view the contents of a DER-encoded CRL file:

 openssl crl -inform DER -noout -text -in example.crl

Software

Sample files

Most SSL certificates contain a link to a CRL file (in the "CRL Distribution Points" extension), so live CRL files are easy to find.

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