yv1ing/z3r0/openssl

openssl

Use openssl for authorized inspection of TLS endpoints and cryptographic material such as certificates, chains, CSRs, public keys, digests, signatures, encodings, and protocol evidence.

Help first

Before constructing commands, run the installed help and subcommand help as needed:

openssl help
openssl <subcommand> -help

Usage rules

• Work only on in-scope endpoints or provided cryptographic artifacts.
• Prefer inspection and verification over transformation.
• Do not generate, overwrite, export, or convert private key material unless the user explicitly requests it and the scope permits it.
• Do not paste private keys, secrets, full certificates with sensitive context, or long binary encodings into the conversation.
• Save certificates, chains, handshake transcripts, and decoded outputs to files when they are large or sensitive.
• Treat protocol and certificate observations as evidence for review; do not overstate cryptographic exploitability without separate validation.

Common workflows

Capture a TLS handshake and certificate chain:

openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -servername example.com -showcerts </dev/null > tls-handshake.txt

Inspect a certificate file:

openssl x509 -in cert.pem -noout -subject -issuer -dates -fingerprint -sha256
openssl x509 -in cert.pem -noout -text

Hash an artifact:

openssl dgst -sha256 artifact.bin

Verify that endpoint findings with time, SNI, port, and command context are recorded because TLS state can change.

Output

Report the target or artifact, command used, key observations, relevant validity/issuer/subject/fingerprint details when applicable, output paths, and any verification errors.