certificates VS easy-rsa

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/

I was just looking at https://smallstep.com/certificates a few days ago. It looks like they have an operator that fits your description as well as example docs for setting up inter-microservice mtls.

Easy-rsa to the rescue. Been using it for a while, works great and makes life easier :)

Link: https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

Summary from that page:

easy-rsa is a CLI utility to build and manage a PKI CA. In laymen's terms, this means to create a root certificate authority, and request and sign certificates, including intermediate CAs and certificate revocation lists (CRL).

No, OpenVPN relies on the CA trust model. Anyone signed by the CA has access, unless they have been revoked (CRL): https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa/blob/master/doc/EasyRSA-Renew-and-Revoke.md

Then make do with the CLI. There might be some tooling to help you, e.g. https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

Hey folks. I'm one of the authors for Mastering OpenVPN, the author of Troubleshooting OpenVPN, and the maintainer of EasyRSA. In light of Apollo and other 3rd party apps going dark on the 30th, I figured I'd "turn in my notice" on Reddit and do the normal sysadmin data dump/brown bag before I'm gone. I've really enjoyed this group and hope things get sorted in the long run.

Correct. That applies to OpenVPN. There's a tool that OpenRSA maintains that help with creating those certificates, EasyRSA: https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

Regarding the keys, csr and certificates it's pretty easy to manage them with easy-rsa (https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa)

$ git clone https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa.git

Depending on your use case, either https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert or https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa

If you can add CAs to the hosts that will access this server, you can be your own certificate authority. mkcert is good, as mentioned elsewhere, or you can go all out: https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa