Certificates
We can consider buying a legitimate certificate, rather than home-brew ones:
You need a key and a certificate to operate your secure server — which means that you can either generate a self-signed certificate or purchase a CA-signed certificate from a CA. What are the differences between the two?
A CA-signed certificate provides two important capabilities for your server:
- Browsers (usually) automatically recognize the certificate and allow a secure connection to be made, without prompting the user.
- When a CA issues a signed certificate, they are guaranteeing the identity of the organization that is providing the webpages to the browser.
The certificate used for LDAP is located at /etc/openldap/root_dn.crt. Do we use the same certificate for everything? If that's only for LDAP then there's no benefit to buying one from an authority, because we're the ones that copy it to each client.
To resign a certificate
To resign a certificate use these two commands:
- openssl req -new -key www.physics.unh.edu.key -out www.physics.unh.edu.csr
- openssl x509 -req -days 3652 -in www.physics.unh.edu.csr -signkey www.physics.unh.edu.key -out www.physics.unh.edu.crt
Find out what the certificate is
- openssl x509 -text -in root_dn.crt
This will print the certificate in text form.
Simple steps to create a self signed certificate
Useful Info:
This is probably a total hack. WARNING NOT FINISHED WITH THIS.
Some Centos info here: http://www.tecmint.com/enable-ssl-for-apache-on-centos/ and here: http://www.server-world.info/en/note?os=CentOS_5&p=ssl
The problem with RedHat info is that it is all "magic GUI" stuff that does not tell you what is happening. Not useful.
Somewhat Useful:
- https://www.unicore.eu/documentation/manuals/unicore6/files/pki-0.2.pdf
- https://evilshit.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/how-to-create-your-own-pki-with-openssl/
- For LDAP TLS certificate (does not say how to generate): http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin24/tls.html
- For LDAP, how to create the certificate: http://www.openldap.org/faq/data/cache/185.html Note CA.sh is not part of our openssl
Create the ROOT certificate
We work in /etc/pki directory and follow the steps from https://www.unicore.eu/documentation/manuals/unicore6/files/pki-0.2.pdf
- mkdir -p -m0700 CA/{csr,certs,crl,private,newcerts}
- touch CA/index.txt
- echo 01 > CA/serial
- dd if=/dev/urandom of=CA/private/.rand bs=1k count=16
- cp /etc/pki/tls/openssl.cnf /etc/pki/ca-cert.cnf # Edit this file to fix the location stuff and set the rootcert properly
- cd CA/
- openssl genrsa -aes256 -out private/cakey.pem -rand private/.rand 4096
- export OPENSSL_CONF=/etc/pki/ca-cert.cnf
- openssl req -new -x509 -sha1 -days 3650 -key private/cakey.pem -out ca.crt # Use old root password without fl$ for pass phrase.
TLS certificate for LDAP
We will work in the /etc/pki directory, even though we are not going to run the pki-ca deamon.
- cd /etc/pki/tls/certs
Create a new certificate key. This key is not properly signed. For pass phrase on einstein, I used the old root password without the fl$ prefix.
- /usr/bin/openssl genrsa -aes256 2048 > einstein.unh.edu.key
Create the csr:
- openssl req -new -key einstein.unh.edu.key -out einsein.unh.edu.csr -subj '/DC=edu/DC=unh/DC=physics/CN=root'
Sign it with the local ROOT CA:
- openssl ca -policy policy_anything -days 3650 -preserveDN -in einstein.unh.edu.csr -out einstein.unh.edu.crt
Change the name option:
- openssl x509 -nameopt RFC2253 -subject -noout -in einstein.unh.edu.crt
General Certificate
Create a new certificate key. This key is not properly signed. For pass phrase on einstein, I used the old root password without the fl$ prefix.
- /usr/bin/openssl genrsa -aes256 2048 > einstein.unh.edu.key
Instead of -aes256 you can also specify -des3. The 2048 is the number of bits. On RedHat 6+ you can use:
- openssl genpkey -algorithm RSA -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_bits:2048 -out $cert.key
Now we can create the csr file (certificate request):
- openssl req -new -key einstein.unh.edu.key -out einstein.unh.edu.csr
Provide the pass phrase specified before, and fill in the questions:
- -----
- Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:US
- State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:New Hampshire
- Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:Durham
- Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:University of New Hampshire
- Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Physics Department
- Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:Einstein
- Email Address []:root@einstein.unh.edu
- Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
- to be sent with your certificate request
- A challenge password []:
- An optional company name []:
Now, finally, you can sign that request yourself:
For the LDAP csr, you may want to specify the subj.
OBSOLETE AND WRONG: Aaron's fantastic certificate stuff
Fantastic, except, it does not work, and nothing is explained, so it really is not so fantastic at all.
Aaron stopped by for a power cable, and we made him pay for it by telling us that roentgen is our Certificate Authority.
To make a new certificate for a machine ("rood_dn" is the hostname of the server the cert is for):
- log onto roentgen
cd /usr/share/ssl/certs- if a certificate already exists for that machine:
- revoke it with
openssl ca -revoke root_dn.crt - move it to the old folder
- revoke it with
make root_dn.csropenssl req -new -key root_dn.key -out root_dn.csr -subj '/DC=edu/DC=unh/DC=physics/CN=root'openssl ca -policy policy_anything -days 3650 -preserveDN -in root_dn.csr -out root_dn.crtopenssl x509 -nameopt RFC2253 -subject -noout -in /root/.ssl/root_dn.crt- copy these newly generated crt, csr, and key files to /etc/openldap/cacerts/ on the machine they were generated for
