Acquiring a certificate

In the following diagram, an application—for instance, a web server—needs a certificate. This diagram looks complex, but we'll break it down into simple steps:

Figure 8.1 – Certificate signing request (CSR) and issuing a certificate

Let's walk through the steps involved in creating a certificate, right from the initial request to having a certificate ready to install in the target application (Steps 1-6), as follows:

1. The process starts by creating a CSR. This is simply a short text file that identifies the server/service and the organization that is requesting the certificate. This file is cryptographically "obfuscated"—while the fields are standardized and are just text, the final result is not human-readable. Tools such as OpenSSL, however, can read both CSR files and certificates themselves (see the OpenSSL cheat sheet section at the end of this chapter if you need examples of...