Attention: this is the key used to sign future certificate requests, anyone holding this can sign certificates on your behalf. So keep it in a safe place!
This procedure needs to be followed for each server/appliance that needs a trusted certificate from our CA
openssl genrsa -out mydomain.com.key 2048
The certificate signing request is where you specify the details for the certificate you want to generate. This request will be processed by the owner of the Root key (you in this case since you create it earlier) to generate the certificate.
Important: Please mind that while creating the signign request is important to specify the Common Name
providing the IP address or domain name for the service, otherwise the certificate cannot be verified.
I will describe here two ways to gener
If you generate the csr in this way, openssl will ask you questions about the certificate to generate like the organization details and the Common Name
(CN) that is the web address you are creating the certificate for, e.g mydomain.com
.
openssl req -new -key mydomain.com.key -out mydomain.com.csr
This method generates the same output as Method A but it's suitable for use in your automation :) .
openssl req -new -sha256 -key mydomain.com.key -subj "/C=US/ST=CA/O=MyOrg, Inc./CN=mydomain.com" -out mydomain.com.csr
If you need to pass additional config you can use the -config
parameter, here for example I want to add alternative names to my certificate.
openssl req -new -sha256 \
-key mydomain.com.key \
-subj "/C=US/ST=CA/O=MyOrg, Inc./CN=mydomain.com" \
-reqexts SAN \
-config <(cat /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf \
<(printf "\n[SAN]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:mydomain.com,DNS:www.mydomain.com")) \
-out mydomain.com.csr
openssl req -in mydomain.com.csr -noout -text
openssl x509 -req -in mydomain.com.csr -CA rootCA.crt -CAkey rootCA.key -CAcreateserial -out mydomain.com.crt -days 500 -sha256
openssl x509 -in mydomain.com.crt -text -noout