topic Importing CA certificate failed in ArcGIS Enterprise Questions

Importing CA certificate failed

BillShoop — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 20:55:58 GMT

Hello all!

I am trying to import an existing server certificate (.pfx) but keep getting "Importing CA certificate failed." message. I dig into the logs and it says the password is incorrect. Weird because I was able to import the .pfx into IIS and bind it to port 443 with the same password. Why would I be getting a password error?

ArcGIS Server 10.9.1

Thanks!

Re: Importing CA certificate failed

JeffSmith — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 22:23:37 GMT

The behavior you are describing sounds like an issue related to special characters in the .pfx password that are getting misinterpreted by ArcGIS Server. That being said, a bug was logged several years ago for that issue specifically which was fixed in 10.7.

BUG-000107534 - SSL Certificates with special characters in the password fails to import to ArcGIS Server.

At 10.9.1 I wouldn't think you would run into that issue. If it is a password issue, a possible workaround would be to import the pfx into IIS (since that works) and export it to a new pfx with a different password.

Re: Importing CA certificate failed

BillShoop — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 18:42:33 GMT

Hey @JeffSmith , I was aware of the bug but like you I wouldn't think it would effect it. Looks like we are both wrong haha. After changing the cert's password to remove the special characters, I was able to import the cert into the ArcGIS Server admin API.

Thanks!

Re: Importing CA certificate failed

SimonSchütte_ct — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 10:22:26 GMT

@JeffSmith I did encounter this issue in ArcGIS Server 10.9.1. The Special Characters used were $ and ~. After changing the password to not include any special characters ( alphanumeric only), the import worked.

There is also an Enhancement logged: ENH-000148002: Enable using special characters (like €, ₹) in the SSL Certificate's password while importing the certificate to ArcGIS Server

btw: Spaces in the file name of certificates can also be problematic.

Re: Importing CA certificate failed

ar_tw — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:43:42 GMT

I've just encountered this issue in ArcGIS Portal 10.9.1
The cert had ( and $ in the password, loaded fine into my ArcGIS Server machines - but NOT into the Portal machine. Imported the cert into IIS, and exported with a new password, and it loaded into Portal fine.

Re: Importing CA certificate failed

ikelagos — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 19:41:02 GMT

just would like to throw this out there, this issue still exists on ArcGIS Enterprise 12.0, our .pfx uses the special char # and we were getting this error { "status": "error", "messages": ["invalid null input"], "code": 500 }

changing the password was the fix.