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I have started taking Ed Harmoush’s Practical TLS course to learn more about TLS and certificates. When learning about TLS, you want to inspect different certificates to see the various fields and see how different organizations use certificates differently. As always, Linux comes with a great set of tools to work with certificates in the form of OpenSSL. In this post, I will show how to download a certificate and discuss some of the fields that are present in the certificate.
To get the certificate, we will use openssl with s_client and connect to a web site. I’m using twitter.com in this example:
openssl s_client -connect twitter.com:443
CONNECTED(00000003)
depth=2 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, OU = www.digicert.com, CN = DigiCert Global Root CA
verify return:1
depth=1 C = US, O = DigiCert Inc, CN = DigiCert TLS Hybrid ECC SHA384 2020 CA1
verify return:1
depth=0 C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Twitter, Inc.", CN = twitter.com
verify return:1
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Certificate chain
0 s:C = US, ST = California, L = San Francisco, O = "Twitter, Inc.", CN = twitter.com
i:C = US, O = Continue reading