Question

I have a PKCS #7, signed, .p7b file which contains an X509 SSL certificate and the intermediate and root CA certs it was signed with. I need to use C# to parse the .p7b file, pull out the SSL certificate, and pull some values off of it (expiry date, DN, etc).

I’ve tried reading it as an X509 certificate like so:

//certContent is a byte array with the p7b file contents
X509Certificate2 cert = new X509Certificate2(certContent);

That works fine with a regular .cer certificate, but throws a CryptographicException when used with a .p7b certificate. This is because the .p7b contains the entire certificate chain.

I’ve also tried parsing it as a SignedCms object, then iterating through the certificate chain and pulling out my SSL certificate:

SignedCms certContainer = new SignedCms();
certContainer.Decode(certContent);
foreach(X509Certificate2 cert in certConatiner.Certificates)
{
     ...
}

However that throws an exception on Decode saying ASN1 bad tag value met. After some searching, I believe that is because I do not have the private key which was used to create the certificate and/or sign the certificate.

Does anyone know how I can parse this .p7b certificate chain using C#?

Answer 1

Well, I’m an idiot. I opened up the .p7b file and realized it was just base64 on the inside. I pulled out the base64, decoded that, then parsed that as a signed CMS and all is well.

String content = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(certContent);
String base64Content = content.Replace("-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----", "").Replace("-----END CERTIFICATE-----", "").Replace("\r", "").Replace("\n", "");
byte[] decodedContent = Convert.FromBase64String(base64Content);
SignedCms certContainer = new SignedCms();
certContainer.Decode(decodedContent);