creating a ssl certificate

A little tutorial on creating an SSl certificate, you can also generate your own self signed certificate to be used in the intranet or for demo :-

1) The first step is to create your RSA Private Key. This key is a 4096 bit RSA key which is encrypted using Triple-DES and stored in a PEM format so that it is readable as ASCII text.

>> openssl genrsa -des3 -out domainname.com.key 4096

Once you run the above command, it will ask you to enter a Pass phrase for your domain key file.

2) Generating a CSR   (Certificate signing request)  :-

Once the private key is generated a Certificate Signing Request can be generated. The CSR is then used in one of two ways. Ideally, the CSR will be sent to a Certificate Authority, such as Thawte or Verisign who will verify the identity of the requestor and issue a signed certificate. or you can use it to create your own self signed certificate for intranets or for demo purpose.

These are the X.509 attributes of the certificate. One of the prompts will be for “Common Name (e.g., YOUR name)”. It is important that this field be filled in with the fully qualified domain name of the server to be protected by SSL. If the website to be protected will be https://domainname.com, then enter domainname.com at this prompt. If you want to create a so called “wildcard” certificate, which means the same certificate can be used on an unlimited number of subdomains, just enter an asterisk as the hostname, in our example that would be *.domainname.com.