ca_kit 0.2.0

Certificate-authority test harness.

Overview

The purpose of this tiny project is just to package the logic needed to:

• Build a CA certificates

• Build a regular certificate

• Sign the regular certificate with the CA certificate

• Verify that the regular certificate is signed with the CA certificate

I find that I often need to do this, and/or need to do this as part of other projects to prove a design. This project assumes some defaults, and makes it ridiculously easy to establish a CA and build certificates. You can pass parameters to change the name of the output files, and the path that they are written to.

The include scripts are largely Python. So, for those who’d like a quick tutorial on how to do these tasks via Python, they might also use this project as a roadmap.

Scripts

This project encapsulates four executable scripts, three of them Python:

Name	Description
ck_create_ca	Create CA keys and certificate
ck_create	Create normal keys
ck_sign	Create a signed certificate using the CA identity
ck_verify_ca	Verify that the signed certificate was issued by the CA

The Python scripts use M2Crypto to manipulate the keys/certificates.

Installation

This project can not be installed. Clone it from the GitHub project, and run the following to install the dependencies:

$ sudo pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To specify a directory, use the “-o” parameter. If none is given, you will be prompted to confirm.

1. Create the CA:

   $ ck_create_ca
   Please confirm output directory []: output

   This generates:

   • ca.crt.pem

   • ca.csr.pem

   • ca.key.pem

   • ca.public.pem

2. Create the normal keys:

   $ ck_create
   Please confirm output directory []: output

   This generates:

   • normal.csr.pem

   • normal.key.pem

   • normal.public.pem

3. Sign the identity:

   $ ck_sign
   Please confirm output directory []: output

   This generates:

   • normal.crt.pem

4. You can also verify that the identity was signed by our CA:

   $ ck_verify_ca
   Please confirm input directory []: output
   Verified.