Requesting, Revoking, or Renewing a Personal Digital Certificate (PDC)


Introduction

Manage your InCommon Personal Digital Certificate (PDC) by either requesting a new one, revoking a valid and existing one, or renewing a soon to expire one.

Contents

Instructions

To Request an InCommon PDC

  1. Go to the Certificate Manager site.
  2. Click InCommon Personal Digital Certificates.
  3. If you see a message about you can only have one active keypair at a time, you will need to revoke the existing keypair, before you can request a new keypair, by following the instructions at To Revoke an InCommon PDC below.
  4. After reading and agreeing to the Terms of Use Agreement, click Request PDC.
  5. The certificate should be issued shortly. You will need to refresh your page until the status changes to FULFILLED.
  6. You may then download your PDC by clicking Action -> PKCS#12 Keypair.
  7. A password will be generated for your downloaded PDC. If you forget your password, you may download the PDC again and a new password will be generated.

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To Revoke an InCommon PDC

  1. Go to the Certificate Manager site.
  2. Click My Certificate Requests.
  3. Click Action -> Revoke next to the InCommon PDC you want to revoke.
  4. Place a check in the box and click OK to confirm revoking the certificate.

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To Renew an InCommon PDC

You may want to renew before expiration of your active PDC. Renewing simply means that you will receive a PDC with the same key pair. In certain applications including Outlook and Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, you must continue to keep your old PDC installed in your certificate store in order to decrypt files encrypted with your old PDC, because these applications look at the certificate fingerprint to find the key pair. If using openssl for decryption, you may use your renewed PDC.

  1. Go to the Certificate Manager site.
  2. Click My Certificate Requests.
  3. Click Action -> Renew next to the PDC you would like to renew.
  4. You will be sent to the page to request a PDC. Follow the instructions at the To Request an InCommon PDC section above to finish renewal.
  5. Note that renewing your PDC will revoke your previously active PDC.