William Robinet of Conostix reveals how cryptographic command-line tools can be manipulated to mislead operators and enable certificate-based attacks.
Cryptographic toolkits underpin certificate management, PKI operations and daily security workflows, yet their command-line utilities often assume benign input and trusted operators. Subtle parsing behaviors in ASN.1, DER and PEM handling can turn routine inspection commands into attack surfaces. Manipulated certificate fields and control characters can alter terminal output, conceal malicious content and mislead administrators into trusting modified cryptographic objects. These risks span multiple TLS and SSL toolkits and expose weaknesses at the intersection of low-level encoding, text rendering and CLI output handling.
This video lesson, taught by William Robinet, CTO at Conostix, will cover:
- Risks posed by visual inspection and automation in certificate workflows;
- Cross-toolkit exposure affecting TLS, SSL and PKI operations;
- Defensive practices for safely interpreting cryptographic CLI output.
Here is the course outline:
Trapped by the CLI: When Cryptographic Toolkit Commands Become Attack Vectors |
Completion
The following certificates are awarded when the course is completed:
 |
CPE Credit Certificate |
