Tag: Certificates

CFSSL FTW

After reading how CloudFlare handles their PKI and that LetsEncrypt will use it I wanted to give CFSSL a shot.

Reading the project’s documentation doesn’t really help in building your own CA, but searching the Internet I found Fernando Barillas’ blog explaining how to create your own root certificate and how to create intermediate certificates from this.

I took it a step further I wrote a script generating new certificates for several services with different intermediates and possibly different configurations (e.g. depending on your distro and services certain cyphers (e.g. using ECC) may not be supported).
I also streamlined generating service specific key, cert and chain files. 😀

Have a look at the full Gist or just the most interesting part:

You’ll still have to deploy them yourself.

Update 2016-10-04:
Fixed some issues with this Gist.

  • Fixed a bug where intermediate CA certificates weren’t marked as CAs any more
  • Updated the example CSRs and the script so it can now be run without errors

Update 2017-10-08:

  • Cleaned up `renew-certs.sh` by extracting functions for generating root CA, intermediate CA and service keys.

Custom CAs everywhere

I recently finished introducing custom CA infrastructure in two instances. Each having two sub CAs, two Servers and a bunch of users. The “create your own CA” part was quite easy after I found  a dated but still accurate tutorial. In hindsight it is quite silly why I didn’t do this before.

On the server side I had to make it work on:

  • Apache
  • Nginx
  • Postfix
  • Cyrus
  • Dovecot

Each expecting its own Format/Packing of certificates, keys and certificate chains. :/

On the client side I had to produce installation and configuration howtos for Windows and OS X and a bunch of popular browsers and email clients. Then there is the “user education” part … this is still in progress, but its looking good.

All in all, I’m happy with the result. 🙂

Howto Renew Your SSL Certificates

So my IMAP server certificate expired today … so I needed to renew it. I use self-signed certificates for services I run myself.

First you need your config file. If you don’t have this you will be prompted to do so. (the Ubuntu Wiki has a nice introduction)

[ req ]
default_bits = 2048
encrypt_key = yes
distinguished_name = req_dn
x509_extensions = cert_type
prompt = no

[ req_dn ]
C=DE
ST=HB
L=Bremen
O=IMAP-Server
OU=Automatically-generated IMAP SSL key
CN=imap.your-domain.tld
emailAddress=postmaster@yourdomain.tld

[ cert_type ]
nsCertType = server

Then you generate the new certificate (expiring in 365 days) using the config file from above (imapd.cnf) and have it save it into imapd.pem.

openssl req -x509 -days 365 -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -config imapd.cnf -keyout imapd.pem -out imapd.pem

Restart your service.

If you need to check the new key’s fingerprint you can get it with the following command.

openssl x509 -in imapd.pem -fingerprint