In its base form, a digital certificate is a binary data structure containing the fields listed in X.509 certificates. It is encoded using Distinguished Encoding Rules (DER), a platform-independent standard for encapsulating data. As with other binary data, remember to transfer a binary certificate in binary format, for example using binary FTP, when you move it to or from a z/OS® system.

It is not necessary for you to examine the contents of a certificate. However, you can peek at them using a text editor because certificates do not contain private keys and are usually not encrypted in any way. If you peek at a data set containing a binary certificate on a z/OS or other EBCDIC platform, the contents appear unintelligible because none of the data is encoded in EBCDIC. On a Windows or other ASCII platform, some string data might be intelligible if it is encoded in ASCII.