1<DRAFT!> 2 HOWTO certificates 3 41. Introduction 5 6How you handle certificates depend a great deal on what your role is. 7Your role can be one or several of: 8 9 - User of some client software 10 - User of some server software 11 - Certificate authority 12 13This file is for users who wish to get a certificate of their own. 14Certificate authorities should read ca.txt. 15 16In all the cases shown below, the standard configuration file, as 17compiled into openssl, will be used. You may find it in /etc/, 18/usr/local/ssl/ or somewhere else. The name is openssl.cnf, and 19is better described in another HOWTO <config.txt?>. If you want to 20use a different configuration file, use the argument '-config {file}' 21with the command shown below. 22 23 242. Relationship with keys 25 26Certificates are related to public key cryptography by containing a 27public key. To be useful, there must be a corresponding private key 28somewhere. With OpenSSL, public keys are easily derived from private 29keys, so before you create a certificate or a certificate request, you 30need to create a private key. 31 32Private keys are generated with 'openssl genrsa' if you want a RSA 33private key, or 'openssl gendsa' if you want a DSA private key. 34Further information on how to create private keys can be found in 35another HOWTO <keys.txt?>. The rest of this text assumes you have 36a private key in the file privkey.pem. 37 38 393. Creating a certificate request 40 41To create a certificate, you need to start with a certificate 42request (or, as some certificate authorities like to put 43it, "certificate signing request", since that's exactly what they do, 44they sign it and give you the result back, thus making it authentic 45according to their policies). A certificate request can then be sent 46to a certificate authority to get it signed into a certificate, or if 47you have your own certificate authority, you may sign it yourself, or 48if you need a self-signed certificate (because you just want a test 49certificate or because you are setting up your own CA). 50 51The certificate request is created like this: 52 53 openssl req -new -key privkey.pem -out cert.csr 54 55Now, cert.csr can be sent to the certificate authority, if they can 56handle files in PEM format. If not, use the extra argument '-outform' 57followed by the keyword for the format to use (see another HOWTO 58<formats.txt?>). In some cases, that isn't sufficient and you will 59have to be more creative. 60 61When the certificate authority has then done the checks the need to 62do (and probably gotten payment from you), they will hand over your 63new certificate to you. 64 65Section 5 will tell you more on how to handle the certificate you 66received. 67 68 694. Creating a self-signed test certificate 70 71If you don't want to deal with another certificate authority, or just 72want to create a test certificate for yourself. This is similar to 73creating a certificate request, but creates a certificate instead of 74a certificate request. This is NOT the recommended way to create a 75CA certificate, see ca.txt. 76 77 openssl req -new -x509 -key privkey.pem -out cacert.pem -days 1095 78 79 805. What to do with the certificate 81 82If you created everything yourself, or if the certificate authority 83was kind enough, your certificate is a raw DER thing in PEM format. 84Your key most definitely is if you have followed the examples above. 85However, some (most?) certificate authorities will encode them with 86things like PKCS7 or PKCS12, or something else. Depending on your 87applications, this may be perfectly OK, it all depends on what they 88know how to decode. If not, There are a number of OpenSSL tools to 89convert between some (most?) formats. 90 91So, depending on your application, you may have to convert your 92certificate and your key to various formats, most often also putting 93them together into one file. The ways to do this is described in 94another HOWTO <formats.txt?>, I will just mention the simplest case. 95In the case of a raw DER thing in PEM format, and assuming that's all 96right for yor applications, simply concatenating the certificate and 97the key into a new file and using that one should be enough. With 98some applications, you don't even have to do that. 99 100 101By now, you have your cetificate and your private key and can start 102using the software that depend on it. 103 104-- 105Richard Levitte 106