Common Actions

Many actions are common to all cryptographic parts and are mentioned here once for all. The goal of this application is to provide an easy to use signing-tool and also a common place for all selected PKI items like requests or certificates.

Column Handling

Column visibility can be changed by the context menu of the table header or the “columns” sub menu of the table context menu. It shows all available columns with check-boxes to show or hide them.

  • Column actions

    • Reset Reset column order and visibility to the default.

    • Hide Column Hide the current column. Only shown in the context menu of the column header.

  • Common columns

  • Certificate and request columns

    • Subject The complete subject name.

    • Subject hash Subject hash used by OpenSSL to lookup certificates. See https://www.openssl.org/docs/man1.0.2/apps/c_rehash.html

    • Subject entries Displays single entries of the subject. The list represents the content of the Object IDs file.

    • X509v3 Extensions Displays a textual representation of the selected extension.

    • Key name Internal name of the key in the private keys tab.

    • Signature algorithm Signature algorithm used to sign the certificate or request.

  • Request columns

    • Signed Whether the request is already signed or not.

    • Unstructured name CSR specific attribute.

    • Challenge password CSR specific attribute.

    • Certificate count Number of certificates in the database with the same public key.

  • Certificate columns

    • CA CA Basic Constraints flag

    • Serial Serial number

    • MD5 / SHA1 / SHA256 fingerprint Certificate fingerprint

Columns can be resized and rearranged. This configuration is stored in the database and will be reassigned next time this database is opened.

Importing items

The import of an item can be done by either clicking the import button on the right or via the context menu available by right clicking into the list. The import function is smart enough to probe all known formats independent of the file extension:

Keys

PEM private key, PEM public key, DER private key, DER public key, PKCS#8 private key, SSH public key.

Requests

DER request, PEM request

Certificates

DER certificate, PEM certificate (PKCS#12 and PKCS#7 certificates must be imported with an extra button, because they may contain more than one certificate and key)

After selecting the filename XCA will probe for the known formats of that item and in case of an error it prompts the last OpenSSL error message. It is possible to select more than one file by selecting them with SHIFT click.

Also the Import menu may be used to load items. Next to the file-types above, it also supports PEM import. PEM describes the encoding instead of the file-type. So a PEM file can be any type of private key, CRL certificate or CSR. This import facility discovers the type and loads it.

When importing more than one Key, CRL, Certificate or Request all items are shown in a Multi-import dialog. When importing a PKCS#7 or PKCS#12 item, the contained keys and certificates are shown in the Multi-import dialog. By using the Multi-import dialog the items can be examined, imported or dropped.

After reading the item it searches for this item in the database and if it is unique, the item is stored in the database. Otherwise it shows a message containing the internal name of this item in the database.

Details of an Item

The details dialog can be accessed by double clicking the item, by the context menu or by the button on the right. The names of the issuers certificate and the corresponding key are click-able and their content will be shown on “double-click”

Renaming an Item

An Item can be renamed via the context menu by right-clicking on the item, by pressing <F2> or by the Rename button on the right border.

Deleting Items

Items can be deleted by the button on the right or via the context menu. Certificate signing requests can be deleted when they got signed, because they are not needed anymore. The request can be recovered from the resulting certificate by transforming the certificate to a request. This is however only possible if you own the private key of the certificate. Multiple items may be selected to delete them all at once.

Searching Items

The displayed list of items can be reduced by the search-input at the bottom right. It affects all tabs. It does not only search inside the displayed columns but the whole content of the items. It searches the internal name, issuer, subject, extensions, PKCS#10 attributes and token provider.

Internal name

The internal name is only used inside the database and is intended to uniquely identify the items. In earlier versions of XCA this name had to be unique. This is not a requirement anymore.

Date and source of appearance

XCA tracks the time and source of any newly appeared item. Both can be seen when selecting Properties in the context menu of an item, or by enabling the Source or Date columns.

The source may be one of the following

  • Imported:

    From a file or by pasting PEM data

  • Generated

    Created by XCA

  • Transformed

    Converted from an other item by the “transform” context menu

  • Token

    The device has been initially read from a hardware token

  • Legacy Database

    The item was already present in a legacy XCA database that did not track the Source information.

The content of the date and source fields will never be part of an exported item.

Comment

XCA allows to insert multi-line comments for all items. They can be edited by the properties dialog. When showing the Comment column, it will display the first line of the comment field.

XCA itself uses the comment field of certificates and requests to leave a note during important operations:

  • Applied templates during certificate or request generation

  • Generated keys during certificate or request generation

  • Signing date, time and internal name of the issuing CA when a request gets signed.

  • File name when the item got imported from a file.

The content of the comment field will never be part of an exported item, except when explicitly selected during PEM export.

Database primary key

When inserting an item into the database a new, unique id will be generated and used as primary key in the database. If the item shall be found in the database by external tools, the items.id can be used to uniquely identify the item. The internal name cannot be used, since it is not necessarily unique anymore.

This ID will never be used outside the database.

Item properties

Common properties can be displayed and edited for all items: