Mastering Linux Security and Hardening - Second Edition

Creating a self-signed certificate with an RSA key

A self-signed certificate is useful when all you need is encryption, or for testing purposes. There's no identity verification involved with self-signed certificates, so you never want to use them on servers that your users need to trust. Let's say that I need to test my new website setup before putting it into production, and I don't want to do my testing with a for-real key and certificate. I'll create the key and the self-signed certificate with one single command:

openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout donnie-domain.key-x509 -days 365 -out donnie-domain.crt

Here's the breakdown:

• openssl: I'm using OpenSSL with just my normal user privileges. For now, I'm doing everything in my own ...