Methods and systems for generating or validating compact certificates include receiving a first format of the certificate. Moreover, obtain a signature for the certificate in the first format. For each field of the certificate decode the field to obtain a value for the field from the first format and encoding the value for the field into a second format. Decoding and encoding for each field is done incrementally in the same order of the fields as the first format. In other words, a next field is not decoded from the first format until the field is encoded in the second format. Furthermore, a security envelope is encoded using the signature in the first format and the fields.