this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
47 points (96.1% liked)

Selfhosted

40329 readers
368 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
ruud@lemmy.world
Loki@lemmy.world
CannaVet@lemmy.world
devve@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.world
HybridSarcasm@lemmy.hybridsarcasm.xyz
47
Up-to-date OpenSSL guide or tool for creating a certificate authority and self-signing TLS certificates? (lemy.lol)
submitted 9 months ago by matcha_addict@lemy.lol to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hello friends,

Just about every guide that comes up on my Google search for "How to create certificate authority with OpenSSL" seems to be out-of-date. Particularly, they all guide me towards creating a certificate that gets rejected by the browser due to the "Common Name" field deprecation, and the requirement of "Subject Alternative Name" field.

Does someone know a tool that creates a Certificate Authority and signs certificates with that CA? A tool that follows modern standards, gets accepted by browsers and other common web tools. Preferably something based on OpenSSL.

If you know a guide that does this using OpenSSL, even better! But I have low hopes for this after going through dozens of guides all having the same issue I mentioned above.

Replies to Some Questions you Might Ask Me

Why not just correct those two fields you mention?

I want to make sure I am doing this right. I don't want to keep running into errors in the future. For example, I actually did try that, and npm CLI rejected my certs without a good explanation (through browser accepts it).

Why not Let's Encrypt?

This is for private services that are only accessible on a private network or VPN

If this is for LAN and VPN only services, why do you need TLS?

TLS still has benefits. Any device on the same network could still compromise the security of the communication without TLS. Examples: random webcam or accessory at your house, a Meta Quest VR headset, or even a compromised smartphone or computer.

Use small step CA (or other ACME tools)

I am not sure I want the added complexity of this. I only have 2 services requiring TLS now, and I don't believe I will need to scale that much. I will have setup a way to consume the ACME server. I am happier with just a tool that spits out the certificates and I manage them that way, instead of a whole service for managing certs.

If I am over estimating the difficulty for this, please correct me.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] matcha_addict@lemy.lol 1 points 9 months ago (13 children)

Would that even work? Pointing my domain to a 192 IP address? I don't see how that would work.

[–] ryper@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Like the other commenter said, you can use Let's Encrypt without needing to expose anything on your network to the internet. I set it up on my network a couple of weeks ago using this guide; I couldn't get caddy to work with duckdns but it worked with Cloudflare without any trouble.

load more comments (9 replies)