basic

Basic ("Leaf") Certificates

This tls-gen variation generates a root CA and two certificate/key pairs signed by it:

• Chain 1: root CA => client certificate/key pair
• Chain 2: root CA => server certificate/key pair

Generating

# pass a private key password using the PASSWORD variable if needed
make
# results will be under the ./result directory
ls -lha ./result

Generated CA certificate as well as client and server certificate and private keys will be under the result directory.

It possible to use ECC for leaf keys:

cd [path to tls-gen repository]/basic
# pass a password using the PASSWORD variable
make USE_ECC=true ECC_CURVE="prime256v1"
# results will be under the ./result directory
ls -lha ./result

The list of available curves can be obtained with

openssl ecparam -list_curves

Generate additional server certificate

If you want to generate additional server certificates using the same Root CA, use:

make CN=newname gen-server

Generate additional client certificate

If you want to generate additional client certificates using the same Root CA, use:

make CN=newname gen-client

Regeneration

To regenerate, use

make regen

The regen target accepts the same variables as gen (default target) above.

Verification

You can verify the generated client and server certificates against the generated CA one with

make verify

Certificate Information

To display client and server certificate information, use

make info

This assumes the certificates were previously generated.

CRL

The Root CA creates certificates whose CRL distribution point is http://crl-server:8000/basic.crl. To make this CRL available, Python 3 can be used, after ensuring that the DNS name crl-server resolves:

cd result
python -m http.server

If you need to test revoking a certificate do the following from the basic directory:

openssl ca -config openssl.cnf -revoke ./result/server_MY-CN_certificate.pem -keyfile ./testca/private/cakey.pem -cert ./testca/cacert.pem

Then regenerate the CRL file:

make gen-crl