62 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
62 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
1. Creating a Certificate Authority.
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To fully understand it's contents you're unfortunately going to need to read ca(1ssl),
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req(1ssl), x509(1ssl), config(5ssl), and x509v3_config(5ssl). Particularly
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important are the x509v3 extensions present in the certificate, which are
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defined in the "stglab_x509_ca_extensions" section of the config file.
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The ca-cert script configures some important files in db/, then creates a
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certificate request and signs it. It also generates an initial (empty)
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revocation list, then substitutes the correct fingerprints into the html
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template for serving the CA certificate and CRL to the intranet.
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2. Creating a certificate.
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The create-cert script can generate three "types" of certificate -- server
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certificates for securing a service with SSL/TLS, client certificates for
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authenticating a client to these services, and user certificates for
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authentication, S/MIME e-mail signing or encryption, and code signing. There
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are minor but important differences in the extensions present in these
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different certificate types, but these are set in the *-ext.tpl files in tpl/
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and thus you shouldn't need to worry about them.
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The create-cert script takes a number of arguments, of which the hostname or
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username and the type are mandatory. It is also a very good idea to supply a
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number of alternative DNS names when generating a server certificate, because
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while the script will happily append "stglab.manchester.uk.ibm.com" to an
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un-qualified host name, it won't append "transitives.com" and for the moment we
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probably need that.
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You should also provide a team name for the organisational unit, e.g.
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"Manchester STG Lab Test", an e-mail address (preferably for the team rather
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than an individual for server/client certificates), and a comment that reflects
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the usage of the certificate, e.g. "Soak Infrastructure Live Server". Reasonable
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defaults are provided for all of these for our team's use.
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3. Renewing a certificate.
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The renew-cert script does some painful certificate manipulation that is not
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strictly necessary in most cases, and may in fact decrease SSL security
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slightly. This is done because the normal renewal process re-generates the
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certificate signing request and thus creates a new public/private keypair.
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If the certificates are used for S/MIME encryption or code signing, this
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renders all the encrypted e-mail unreadable and requires you to re-sign the
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code with your new private key. The code in renew-cert re-signs the old
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certificate request with a new expiry date and the extensions generated when
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the original certificate was created, and avoids this problem.
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Renewing a certificate is done by giving the hostname, username or path to
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the certificate to renew-cert.sh.
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4. Revoking a certificate.
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Revoking a certificate is done by giving the hostname, username or path to
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the certificat to revoke-cert.sh. This script also regenerates a new CRL in
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both PEM and DER encodings (firefox prefers the latter while IE and other
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browsers work better with the former), and re-generates the html file with the
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new fingerprints.
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