In December 2018, an expired certificate at Ericsson took mobile data offline for roughly 32 million O2 customers in the UK. In February 2020, Microsoft Teams went down for hours because a certificate lapsed. Both companies had money, talent, and tooling. What they did not have was a specific person … [Read more...] about Certificate Ownership Is an Operating Model Problem, Not a Tooling Problem
OpenSSL ca: Create and Manage an Internal Certificate Authority
Overview The openssl ca command can turn OpenSSL into a small certificate authority capable of doing considerably more than simply signing a certificate. It can: That makes it useful for system administrators who need a lightweight CA for: However, openssl ca should not be confused … [Read more...] about OpenSSL ca: Create and Manage an Internal Certificate Authority
OpenSSL rehash: Create a Hashed CA Certificate Directory
OpenSSL rehash: Create a Hashed CA Certificate Directory Overview Copying a trusted CA certificate into a directory does not always make that directory usable as an OpenSSL trust store. Many OpenSSL-based applications do not scan every certificate file in a directory whenever they need to … [Read more...] about OpenSSL rehash: Create a Hashed CA Certificate Directory
OpenSSL asn1parse: Decode Certificates and ASN.1 Data
OpenSSL asn1parse: How to Decode and Troubleshoot ASN.1 Data Overview Certificates, certificate signing requests, private keys, CRLs, and many other PKI objects are built from ASN.1 data structures. Most system administrators do not need to inspect those structures byte by byte during normal … [Read more...] about OpenSSL asn1parse: Decode Certificates and ASN.1 Data
How to Create a Private CA with OpenSSL CA.pl
Overview System administrators frequently need TLS certificates for systems that are not publicly accessible (and can leverage OpenSSL CA.pl as a solution), including: A public certificate authority may not be appropriate for these systems, especially when their hostnames are only resolvable … [Read more...] about How to Create a Private CA with OpenSSL CA.pl
EV Certificates – Extended Validation Certificates
Question: What are EV Certificates? Answer: Extended Validation (EV) Certificates are SSL Certificates that are issued after a rigorous validation process. The cryptographic strength and security of an EV certificate is no different than that of a DV (Domain Validated) or OV (Organization … [Read more...] about EV Certificates – Extended Validation Certificates
openssl s_client commands and examples
The s_client command from OpenSSL is a helpful test client for troubleshooting remote SSL or TLS connections as well as check whether a certificate is valid, trusted, and has a complete certificate chain. The post strives to walk you through various examples of testing SSL connections with different … [Read more...] about openssl s_client commands and examples
Convert PEM to other formats
Before covering how to convert to pem from different certificate formats let us define what each of the certificate file extensions means. .pem - Privacy Enhanced Mail Certificate. A PEM file is Base64 encoded and may be an X.509 certificate file, a private key file, or any other key material. … [Read more...] about Convert PEM to other formats