certificates VS keymaster

I've been doing this for a while with SmallStep CA: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates

It's a bit of a pain to load a cert onto every device (easier with stuff like Ansible if you have a bunch of linux devices), but manageable. And it lets me do proper trusted TLS for a lot of stuff that would otherwise be self-signed.

One thing I recommend is to add X509v3 Name Constraints extensions to your root CA if you go down this path. It prevents the CA from being abused to MITM you for other URLS (at least for browsers/clients that respect names constraints)

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You can roll your own with https://github.com/smallstep/certificates. We maintain major open source projects and contribute a lot to other projects. I don’t think that means everything we do has to be open source. Sorry this one wasn’t. Doing this in pure open source would be a book, not a blog post.

Love Let’s Encrypt — we’re sponsors — but using them for WiFi is a terrible idea. You need internal PKI for WiFi.

letsencrypt was always about moving the public internet off of http, it doesn't really make sense to use it throughout your internal network. but if you really want TLS and ACME for auto renewal, other solutions are available: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates

You could try step-ca: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates. There’s an OIDC provisioner for SSO and you can sign (short-lived) SSH certificates with it.

You could also check out out Step CA: https://github.com/smallstep/certificates and the accompanying CLI. It has an ACME server and other methods for requesting certificates. It can work/integrate with your existing root(s), too.

This is a lot more complicated setup but it works for me. I run a private CA called step-ca from smallstep and it provides CA and ACME endpoint. I use a .home domain. The trick is the validation for non-http devices which is typically the DNS-01 challenge. For this, I have unbound in pfsense setup to work with acme-dns so I can keep everything internal. Again its complicated but if your learning cyber security it might help get a handle on all things TLS. Btw way behind the scenes I think the ACME plugin is really just running acme.sh bash script which is really good. Final reminder as other have stated. Private CA is great but you need to distro the roots and intermediates out to your clients for trust. If all your trying to do is have an https web gui for pfsense from one device its pretty easy.

Just a little heads up https://smallstep.com/certificates/

Step-ca: Not web based, but the CLI is pretty user friendly: https://smallstep.com/certificates/

Also became a fun learning experience about terminals.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/cmdg

I wanted to use GMail from a fast cli that used the native gmail API.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/rslurp

I wanted to download concurrently and according to patterns. Ok, so honestly this one probably exists somewhere in a form that I would like, but I couldn't find it.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/sim

I wanted multi-party authorization for sudo, and couldn't find one.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/monotonic_clock

People kept using gettimeofday, so this is part of my compaign against it. (see https://blog.habets.se/2010/09/gettimeofday-should-never-be-...)

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/gtping

I worked in mobile core networks, and wanted a "ping" that used the GTP protocol since that won't be firewalled.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/ind

I wanted my bash scripts to have automatic indentation, while not sacrificing buffering latency and such.

https://github.com/ThomasHabets/tlscheck

I wanted a simple tool to audit my TLS certificates for expiry.

https://github.com/google/huproxy

I was travelling to China on vacation and wanted a VPN out that would be unlikely to be blocked by the great firewall. Ok, so there are many VPN-like tools for getting through the GFW. Maybe it was just an excuse for me to write it. Honestly ssh -D would have likely worked just fine. It's being used by the keymaster project now though, so maybe it did something right: https://github.com/Cloud-Foundations/keymaster/blob/master/d...

https://github.com/google/tcpauth

I wanted to lock down SSH to anyone who doesn't have a secret key (and portknocking is usually ridiculous). Why not use TCP MD5 for it? https://github.com/google/tcpauth

Keymaster works great for users. Can issue user x509 and ssh certs. DNS challenge for server certs. I use Traefik for that.

-- This! I use this with Keymaster. Works very well.

I'm a fan of signed / temporary keys. Check out https://github.com/Cloud-Foundations/keymaster

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