Originally written Jun 2, 2008, and updated on May 21, 2009
Overview
At some point or another, you’ll likely end up needing an SSL certificate for a Web site somewhere along the line. For a commercial site, your hosting provider can or will help you get this all squared away. This article is not for people in that situation.
What we’re doing here will be to create our own Certificate Authority. Then, we’ll create our own server key and a signing request. Then, we’ll sign our own certificate using the key and certificate from our own Certificate Authority. In other words, we’re not just going to create an SSL certificate, but we’re going to sign that bad boy, too.
This is useful for personal websites that need a little security, or when you’re waiting for your real cert from a real Certificate Authority. Perhaps you need it for transmitting data from an external server to your Intranet. Or perhaps you need it in any of the three hundred thousand seven hundred forty-two other situations that may arise.
Certificate Authority
The first thing that you’ll need is root access to the server. SSH in and head somewhere secure like /root.
Next, we’ll go ahead and generate our own Certificate Authority key. In this step, we are impersonating someone like Verisign or Thawte. Well, not impersonating, but we are going to do the same thing for ourselves that they would normally do.
To create our key, we’ll run this command:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 4096
When we do that, it looks something like this:
[1257][root@mail:~/cert]$ openssl genrsa -des3 -out ca.key 4096
Generating RSA private key, 4096 bit long modulus
...............................................................................................................................++
.................................................++
e is 65537 (0x10001)
Enter pass phrase for ca.key: [enter a pass phrase here for the CA key]
Verifying - Enter pass phrase for ca.key: [verify the same pass phrase here]
[1258][root@mail:~/cert]$
Note that those pass phrases are something you make up right then. You are not authenticating anything, but rather setting up a pass phrase for authenticating later.
Next, we’ll need to use that key to create a certificate. Before we do this, the information that you will enter here is NOT the information you will enter later for your own server. Remember, we are emulating a Certificate Authority here. When we generate our server certificate, we will put in the real information which must differ from what is here. With that, let’s whip out the certificate. Notice that we are making it good for 3650 days, or 10 years. Adjust to your taste. So let’s make the cert, now. This is done with the following command:
openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -key ca.key -out ca.crt
And doing this may resemble something like this:
[1306][root@mail:~/cert]$ openssl req -new -x509 -days 3650 -key ca.key -out ca.crt
Enter pass phrase for ca.key: [enter the CA pass phrase from above here]
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:WA
Locality Name (eg, city) []:Redmond
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Microsoft Corporation
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:www.microsoft.com
Email Address []:bill.gates@microsoft.com
[1307][root@mail:~/cert]$
Our Server Key and CSR
Next up on the list is to create a key that corresponds to our server. The first one we made was for the Certificate Authority. This one will be generated by and for our own server. We will do that with this command:
openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 4096
The output should look familiar:
[1310][root@mail:~/cert]$ openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 4096
Generating RSA private key, 4096 bit long modulus
................................++
....++
e is 65537 (0x10001)
Enter pass phrase for server.key: [enter a pass phrase here for our server key]
Verifying - Enter pass phrase for server.key: [verify the same pass phrase here]
[1313][root@mail:~/cert]$
Again, those pass phrases are something you make up right then. You are not authenticating anything, but rather setting up a pass phrase for authenticating later.
Now… let’s see… oh yeah. Now, we have to create a signing request, or CSR, from the server key we just made. This signing request will usually make a trip to a genuine Certificate Authority to have the key signed and a real, verified, bonafide signed certificate returned back to us. So, to generate our signed certificate, we’ll need to first have a signing request so we can make the signed cert. See how that works?
To create the CSR, we do this:
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
Now remember, kids. This is the part where we do put in our actual real information because the server does in fact belong to us. Put in the real domain where it says “Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:”. Fill out everything correctly. And so we do:
[1313][root@mail:~/cert]$ openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
Enter pass phrase for server.key: [enter the pass phrase here for our server key from above]
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:US
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:UT
Locality Name (eg, city) []:Eagle Mountain
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:Suse Blog
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:www.suseblog.com
Email Address []:my-address@suseblog.com [put in your real email address here]
Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:
[1323][root@mail:~/cert]$
Sign the Certificate
Now, we are going to take all these files and make them do some voodoo. We are going to sign the signing request using the Certificate Authority certificate and key that we made at the beginning. What we will get is our perfectly forged signed certificate. OK, not perfectly, because we are not a real CA. But we’ll get a pretty darn good signed cert that will work for us rather nicely.
The command we’re going to run looks like this:
openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in server.csr -CA ca.crt -CAkey ca.key -set_serial 01 -out server.crt
And when we run it, we see something hopefully resembling this:
[1326][root@mail:~/cert]$ openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in server.csr -CA ca.crt -CAkey ca.key -set_serial 01 -out server.crt
Signature ok
subject=/C=US/ST=UT/L=Eagle Mountain/O=Suse Blog/CN=www.suseblog.com/emailAddress=my-address@suseblog.com
Getting CA Private Key
Enter pass phrase for ca.key: [enter the CA pass phrase from above here]
[1332][root@mail:~/cert]$
Generate server.key That Won’t Prompt for Password
Now, we have a little problem. Our server.key file will cause apache2 to prompt us for a password every time it starts. We need to fix it so that doesn’t happen. We’ll do that with these three commands:
openssl rsa -in server.key -out server.key.insecure
mv server.key server.key.secure
mv server.key.insecure server.key
When we run these commands, here’s our output:
[1354][root@mail:~/cert]$ openssl rsa -in server.key -out server.key.insecure
Enter pass phrase for server.key: [enter the pass phrase here for our server key from above]
writing RSA key
[1354][root@mail:~/cert]$ mv server.key server.key.secure
[1354][root@mail:~/cert]$ mv server.key.insecure server.key
[1354][root@mail:~/cert]$
Placing the Files
At this stage, you should now have a bunch of files. These, in fact:
[1354][root@mail:~/cert]$ ll
total 32
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-06-02 13:54 .
drwx------ 10 root root 4096 2008-06-02 13:35 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2529 2008-06-02 13:07 ca.crt [CA certificate]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3311 2008-06-02 12:58 ca.key [CA key]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2049 2008-06-02 13:32 server.crt [our server certificate]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1748 2008-06-02 13:23 server.csr [our server signing request]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3243 2008-06-02 13:54 server.key [our password-less server key]
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3311 2008-06-02 13:13 server.key.secure [our passworded server key]
[1355][root@mail:~/cert]$
Just having them doesn’t get us anywhere, so let’s get them installed. First, we are going to change some permissions, because we don’t want just anyone having access to these files. To apply the appropriate permissions, run this:
chmod 0600 server.key.secure server.key server.csr server.crt
Now, here’s where things depend on the distribution that you are using. I will describe what I am doing so that if you are not on OpenSUSE, you will still be able to get this working.
In OpenSUSE, the apache2 config directory is located at /etc/apache2. Underneath that, there are a handful of directories. The three we care about are /etc/apache2/ssl.crt, /etc/apache2/ssl.csr, and /etc/apache2/ssl.key. The server.crt needs to be moved to /etc/apache2/ssl.crt. The server.csr file needs to be moved to /etc/apache2/ssl.csr. And the server.key file needs to be moved to /etc/apache2/ssl.key:
[1348][root@mail:~/cert]$ mv server.key /etc/apache2/ssl.key/server.key
[1349][root@mail:~/cert]$ mv server.crt /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/server.crt
[1349][root@mail:~/cert]$ mv server.csr /etc/apache2/ssl.csr/server.csr
[1349][root@mail:~/cert]$
Yep, pretty complex stuff, moving files.
Now, we need to make a handful more edits to some files, and we’re just about there.
System Configuration
First thing is to edit /etc/sysconfig/apache2. Search through that file for the directive called APACHE_MODULES. Make sure you see ’ssl’ in there. If not, add it. Then, search through the file and find APACHE_SERVER_FLAGS. Make sure it has ‘SSL’ in it. If not, add it. Save and close the file.
You can also manage apache’s modules with the ‘a2enmod’ command. To view the list of loaded modules, run ‘a2enmod -l’.
Next, open up the config file that tells apache2 which ports to listen on. In OpenSUSE, this file is /etc/apache2/listen.conf. Rip that bad boy open. You will see the following line:
Listen 80
Add a new line for port 443, our HTTPS port, so that it looks like this:
Listen 80
Listen 443
Then, look for the following line:
NameVirtualHost *:80
Add a new line for port 443, our HTTPS port, so that it looks like this:
NameVirtualHost *:80
NameVirtualHost *:443
Save and quit.
Virtual Host Configuration
In OpenSUSE, it’s really easy to have virtual hosts on a machine. I have like 10 on mine. One of them is my blog, www.suseblog.com. Well, to make this easy, in OpenSUSE, the virtual domain configuration files are located in /etc/apache2/vhosts.d, each with their own name. My www.suseblog.com configuration file is called suseblog.conf. To set up SSL for this virtual host, just duplicate the file and give it another name. In my case, I named it ssl-suseblog.conf.
Now, we’re going to open up that file and add like 4 lines to it. No sweat.
At the top of the file, there is a line that looks like this:
<VirtualHost *:80>
Change the port from 80 to 443, so it looks like this:
<VirtualHost *:443>
Then, go down a ways and add these lines:
SSLEngine on
SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl.key/server.key
Save and quit on that one, too.
Configure Firewall
We can configure this thing perfectly, but if the firewall doesn’t know to let traffic through, we will not have HTTPS access to the server. Let’s check the firewall really quick to make sure.
Fire up YAST. Go to the Security & Users option on the right, and select FIREWALL from the left. If you do not have a firewall running on the machine, you can just exit now. If you do, you will need to go to ALLOWED SERVICES. In the SERVICES TO ALLOW drop-down on the right, select HTTPS Server. Then click ADD. Then click NEXT, and finally FINISH. You should now have port 443 opened for HTTPS business.
Now, let’s go ahead and restart apache and enjoy our new self-signed self-generated SSL cert on our HTTPS service:
[1426][root@mail:/etc/apache2]$ /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Syntax OK
Shutting down httpd2 (waiting for all children to terminate) done
Starting httpd2 (prefork) done
[1427][root@mail:/etc/apache2]$
Conclusion
Well, we’ve concluded. Enjoy.
More info on the mod_ssl page
