easy-rsa VS cfssl

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 Anyone signed by the CA has access, unless they have been revoked (CRL): https://github.com/OpenVPN/easy-rsa/blob/master/doc/EasyRSA-Renew-and-Revoke.md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

cfssl is kinda outright better version of that.

The Cloudflare SSL tools at https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl might help. Here's what it shows for one of the example Snake Oil certs:

I've used this in the past and it worked great. https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl

The first step is to create the source key that represents our user. This key is created using a tool like openssl but another popular tool to use is cfssl, created by Cloudflare. Some folks think cfssl is easier to use, and it definitely looks easier to script. But for this example we will use openssl. You can also choose to create the key using a number of different algorithms. For this example we will use ED25519.

TLS/SSL worked well with client certificates generated by the CFSSL API.

Not sure if relevant but we used tooling from CloudFlare in the past: https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl