Compact certificate formats that may be used in a fabric or network between devices. The compact format includes a serial number field tagged with a tag of 1, a signature algorithm field tagged with a tag of 2, an issuer field tagged with a tag of 3, an encoded version of a public key tagged with a tag of A, and a signature field tagged with a tag of C. Each field includes the respective tags and corresponding values encoded in a tag-length-value (TLV) format, and each tag value is represented in hexadecimal.