How to edit an existing Certificate Revocation List

How can one edit a Certificate Revocation List aka CRL? If you use openssl or easy-rsa to manage client certificates, they already have the tools built in to generate a CRL based on the certificates that exist in your PKI.

What if you don’t have all the original PKI files? Fortunately easy-rsa is simpler under the hood than how it looks like. All you need is the original CA key and certificate, and you can dump the contents of the existing CRL back into the easy-rsa format, edit the human readable file of certificates to revoke, and generate an updated CRL.

The details: easy-rsa only really cares about the existence of pki/ca.crt and pki/private/ca.key. It will complain about missing directories and files, but feel free to create them as empty files and directories.

A CRL is a list of serial numbers of certificates, with the entire file signed by the CA, and saved in X509 format.

To add a certificate to the CRL, you don’t need the original key, you don’t need the certificate either, only the serial number of the certificate.

You can print the serial number of a certificate using this openssl command: openssl x509 -noout -serial -in CERTIFICATEFILE.crt

easy-rsa keeps the tally of the certificates it manages in the human readable pki/index.txt file. It’s a list of certificate serial numbers, their expiration dates, and their status (Valid, Expired, Revoked)

If you don’t have this file any more, it’s fine. The following command takes all the serials from an existing CRL file and prints it in the easy-rsa index.txt format:

openssl crl -in DOWNLOADED-CRL.pem -noout -text | grep "Serial Number:" | awk ' { print "R\t200330000000Z\t200330000000Z\t" $NF "\tunknown\t" } '

You can save this output in pki/index.txt.

The format is pretty simple, it’s tab-separated. The fields are:

– status (R for revoked)
– expiration datetime in ‘YYMMDDhhmmssZ’ format
– revocation datetime in ‘YYMMDDhhmmssZ’ format
– serial number
– name of file, interestingly it’s kept as ‘unknown’
– Subject Name of certificate, but it can be left empty

Now you have recreated your index.txt and you also know what data is in it. If you want to add a new certificate to revoke, add another line and enter the information above.

When you are satisfied, run ./easyrsa gen-crl and it will create an updated /pki/crl.pem file containing the list of your existing and new revoked certificates.

If you use certificate based VPN systems like Amazon AWS VPC Client VPN, this can save your hide. HTH

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