I need a 509 digital certificate to interact with the Medicare system as a provider. Any recommendation as to where to go for this? Been trying only for an hour, not getting anywhere.

There are any number of Certification Authorities that will sell you a signed X.509 cert. One place to get a list of these is to see what CA's your browser trusts. Another is the Wikipedia page for "Certificate Authority." Be sure, when you are inquiring, that you specify that you are looking for an individual certificate, not the more commonly issued server cert. You will have to provide some sort of proof of identity to a legitimate provider, more than just a driver's license. I am sure the larger CA's are familiar with Medicare's requirements in this regard, but Medicare should have published a list of requirements.

Thanks for the advice. Prior searches I primarily found explanations, but not a company that provides the DC. Looks like I am going with Komodo from the SSL store.

I used to use Komodo for certs at work. Both certs for our web servers and other digital certs.

does it need to have an established public trust chain?

Or just be a x509 cert and your have the corresponding private key?

Here is a step by step for generating what is called self-signed certificate (no public trust chain) cryptographically they are the same, the trust chain is a way to verify through 3rd party relationships.

https://www.akadia.com/service...est_certificate.html

There are also online in web sites that can do the same thing.

Well I went with Komodo, but what it generated was not accepted by Medicare. I believe it cannot be a self-signed certificate. So 4 hours later, still trying to find a solution.

I did a quick Google search for "how do I get an x 509 certificate".

Found a couple of explanations as well as a couple of potential vendors.

Hope this helps.

If you have the requirements it may help if you post them here. We use document signing certs at work and we get them from Entrust. The approved trust list from Adobe was referenced in a few places where certs were required so we went with someone on that list.

https://helpx.adobe.com/acroba...ved-trust-list1.html

We use Entrust for our certs at work.

quote:

Originally posted by c1steve:
Well I went with Komodo, but what it generated was not accepted by Medicare. I believe it cannot be a self-signed certificate.

I'm confused. Assuming you paid for a cert from Comodo, it should be signed by a Certificate Authority. In a self-signed cert, you are your own CA. You don't need Comodo, or anybody else, to create self-signed certs.

Comodo explains the difference here: Self Signed Certificate vs CA Certificate — Which One’s Right for Me?

A problem I ran into with Comodo, in the past, was the certs they'd provide would be in such a form that I'd have to manually "massage" them to make them work. This happened because they'd use Intermediate CAs. I'd have to concatenate the Intermediate CA certs into the certs issued to me so verification could track the chain of trust back to a trusted root CA.

To make matters worse: They'd change what they'd send to me every time I renewed our certs, so I'd have to figure out how to make them work all over again every time.

Sounds like their cert issuance system is still a PITA

You might have to pay Real Money to somebody like VeriSign to get usable certs.

Medicare tells me that the file needs to end in .cer, .crt, or .pem

Yes Komodo seems to not be very solid in this regard. At least the price was good. I am going to try Entrust now, hopefully will make some progress.
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Looked into Entrust, price is $315/year for an individual. Will try some other venders. The primary reason I need the cert. is so that I can send Medicare patients out for an MRI.
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Found a note online that MC only accepts certs from Entrust, Digicert, and Symantec. The first two are about the same price, so I may give up on Medicare for the time being. I rarely submit to MC, so it is no big loss at this time.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: c1steve,

quote:

Originally posted by c1steve:
...
Looked into Entrust, price is $315/year for an individual.
...
Found a note online that MC only accepts certs from Entrust, Digicert, and Symantec. The first two are about the same price, ...

Yeah, the big guys are expensive, which is why I didn't use them.

I don't bother with any of them anymore. I get the certs for my web, email, and other servers from Let's Encrypt. (Not applicable to your requirements.)