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shadowCA

Create a CA and Certificates to use in your Infrastructure

Idea

It becomes more and more important to have your infrastructure communication secured with certificates. Not every environment provide a CA that can easily be used for that infrastructure.

Taking shadow it and implement that might not be best practice but it is supposted to 'just works' and therefore is used in production.

The scripts in this repository should give you the option of POC usage and might be used in production - but was never build for that.

After reading Brad Touesnard posting about become your own CA (for development) it kicks me that I would need todo this in every Customer Environment where this might be needed. So the idea of shadowCA was born.

Installation

Clone this repository on a host that should hold your CA:

 git clone https://github.com/graylog-labs/shadowCA.git

Create your CA

Some settings can be changed in the shadowCA.cfg file to fit your environment. After that run create_ca_certificate.sh to create your certificate authority

bash bin/create_ca_certificate.sh

The script will try to detect if a CA is already present (and abort if). If run successfull you will get a similar output like the following:

Config file is unclean, cleaning it...

Generate Private Key ...
 choose a strong CA Password if requested!!

Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus
........+++
..............................+++
e is 65537 (0x10001)
Enter pass phrase for /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/CA/shadowCA.key:
Verifying - Enter pass phrase for /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/CA/shadowCA.key:

Sign ROOT Certificate with your previous entered CA Password ...

Enter pass phrase for /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/CA/shadowCA.key:

Create DER from /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/CA/shadowCA.pem
Success
now you can Import
 /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/CA/shadowCA.pem or
 /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/CA/shadowCA.der
into your Systems Truststore

This is needed on all System that should trust this CA.

The pass phrase for the CA is used to sign your CA and all certificates you create with the included scripts. Keep that in mind, as we do not include any script to reset this key.

Install CA on Systems

Detailed configurations to add or remove the CA certificate from various Systems is documented in docs/add_ca_to_truststore.md. Details for the most common Linux distributions below.

Debian / Ubuntu

Copy shadowCA.pem to dir /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/ Use command like: sudo cp cert/CA/shadowCA.pem /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/shadowCA.pem Update the CA store: sudo update-ca-certificates

CentOS / RedHat

Install the ca-certificates package: yum install ca-certificates Enable the dynamic CA configuration feature: update-ca-trust force-enable Add it as a new file to /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/: cp cert/CA/shadowCA.pem /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/ Use command: update-ca-trust extract

Create certificates

With just the single command create_certificate.sh you are able to create now host certificates to be used for all kind server and services. Without any argument it will just gives you a small hint that something is missing and how to get help -? will provide you the following:


  This script will generate certificates, sign them with your shadowCA and write them to

  Options available:
      -h  to set Hostnames (can be used multiple times)
      -i  to set IP Adresses (can be used multiple times)
      -d  (optional) Number of Days the certificate is valid (default=365)

The first provided hostname will be used as common name and all additional will be used as alternative names. By default 127.0.0.1 is added as IP alternative name and additional IPs can be added too.

Succesfull run could look like the following

bash bin/create_certificate.sh -h nuci3.local.lan -h nuci3.lan -h nuci3.local
Config file is unclean, cleaning it...

Created /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/nuci3.local.lan ...
... create private Key for nuci3.local.lan
Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus
...........................................................................................................................................................................+++
.....+++
e is 65537 (0x10001)
... write configuration for nuci3.local.lan ...
... create Certificate Request for nuci3.local.lan ...
... prepare sign of nuci3.local.lan request ...
... sign of nuci3.local.lan request ...
Signature ok
subject=/C=DE/ST=NRW/L=Herne/O=shadowCA/OU=Support shadowCA/CN=nuci3.local.lan/[email protected]
Getting CA Private Key
Enter pass phrase for /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/CA/shadowCA.key:
created /Users/jd/bench/shadowCA/cert/nuci3.local.lan/nuci3.local.lan that contains all needed files

total 48
drwxr-xr-x  8 jd  staff   256 12 Feb 13:40 .
drwxr-xr-x  5 jd  staff   160 12 Feb 13:40 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 jd  staff   203 12 Feb 13:40 nuci3.local.lan.cnf
-rw-r--r--  1 jd  staff  1712 12 Feb 13:40 nuci3.local.lan.crt
-rw-r--r--  1 jd  staff  1062 12 Feb 13:40 nuci3.local.lan.csr
-rw-r--r--  1 jd  staff   221 12 Feb 13:40 nuci3.local.lan.ext
-rw-r--r--  1 jd  staff  1675 12 Feb 13:40 nuci3.local.lan.key
-rw-r--r--  1 jd  staff  3387 12 Feb 13:40 nuci3.local.lan.pem

Missing

  • error handling for certificate creation (wrong password)
  • create a java keystore that can be used
  • revoke certificates
  • renew certificates

WARNING

This scripts are not written to be a solid production CA for your environment, more to kickstart your POC. **Use this on your own risk**.