certificates VS mkcert

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.

The experimental HTTPS flag relies on mkcert, designed for a single development system. If you run a Docker container, the flag won’t configure your local browser to trust its certificate.

The author mentions difficulties with HTTPS and trying stuff locally.

I've had some success with mkcert [1] to easily create certificates trusted by browsers, I can suggest to look into this. You are your own root CA, I think it can work without an internet connection.

[1] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert/

Solution: mkcert – Your Zero-Configuration HTTPS Enabler Meet mkcert, a user-friendly, zero-configuration tool designed for creating locally-trusted development certificates. Find it on its GitHub page and follow the instructions tailored for your operating system. For Mac users employing Homebrew, simply execute the following commands in your terminal:

Well, Certifi does not ship with your company's certificates! So requesting internal services may come with additional painful extra steps! Also for a local development environment that uses mkcert for example!

My project, getlocalcert.net[1] may be the one you're thinking of.

Since I'm also building in this space, I'll give my perspective. Local certificate generation is complicated. If you spend the time, you can figure it out, but it's begging for a simpler solution. You can use tools like mkcert[2] for anything that's local to your machine. However, if you're already using ACME in production, maybe you'd prefer to use ACME locally? I think that's what Anchor offers, a unified approach.

There's a couple references in the Anchor blog about solving the distribution problem by building better tooling[3]. I'm eager to learn more, that's a tough nut to crack. My theory for getlocalcert is that the distribution problem is too difficult (for me) to solve, so I layer the tool on top of Let's Encrypt certificates instead. The end result for both tools is a trusted TLS certificate issued via ACME automation.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674224

2. https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

3. https://blog.anchor.dev/the-acme-gap-introducing-anchor-part...

Looks like step-ca/step-cli [1] and mkcert [2] have been mentioned. Another related tool is XCA [3] - a gui tool to manage CAs and server/client TLS certificates. It takes off some of the tedium in using openssl cli directly. It also stores the certs and keys in an encrypted database. It doesn't solve the problem of getting the root CA certificate into the system store or of hosting the revocation list. I use XCA to create and store the root CA. Intermediate CAs signed with it are passed to other issuers like vault and step-issuer.

[1] https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca/

[2] https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert

[3] https://hohnstaedt.de/xca/

We use mkcert for this, it works wonderfully.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert