NAME

ocspcheck —

check a certificate for validity against its OCSP responder

SYNOPSIS

ocspcheck [-Nv] [-C CAfile] [-i staplefile] [-o staplefile] file

DESCRIPTION

The ocspcheck utility validates a PEM format certificate against the OCSP responder encoded in the certificate specified by the file argument. Normally it should be used for checking server certificates and maintaining saved OCSP responses to be used for OCSP stapling.

The options are as follows:

-C CAfile: Specify a PEM format root certificate bundle to use for the validation of requests. By default no certificates are used beyond those in the certificate chain provided by the file argument.
-i staplefile: Specify an input filename from which a DER-encoded OCSP response will be read instead of fetching it from the OCSP server. A filename of ‘-’ will read the response from standard input.
-N: Do not use a nonce value in the OCSP request, or validate that the nonce was returned in the OCSP response. By default a nonce is always used and validated when retrieving a response from an OCSP server. The use of this flag is a security risk as it will allow OCSP responses to be replayed. It should not be used unless the OCSP server does not support the use of OCSP nonces.
-o staplefile: Specify an output filename where the DER encoded response from the OCSP server will be written, if the OCSP response validates. A filename of ‘-’ will write the response to standard output. By default the response is not saved.
-v: Increase verbosity. This flag may be specified multiple times to get more verbose output. The default behaviour is to be silent unless something goes wrong.

EXIT STATUS

The ocspcheck utility exits 0 if the OCSP response validates for the certificate in file and all output is successfully written out. ocspcheck exits >0 if an error occurs or the OCSP response fails to validate.

HISTORY

The ocspcheck utility first appeared in OpenBSD 6.1.

AUTHORS

ocspcheck was written by Bob Beck.

CAVEATS

While ocspcheck could possibly be used in scripts to query responders for server certificates seen on client connections, this is almost always a bad idea. God kills a kitten every time you make an OCSP query from the client side of a TLS connection.

BUGS

ocspcheck will create the output file if it does not exist. On failure a newly created output file will not be removed.