Open SSL Creating Certificate Signing Request — CSR Generation

A Certificate Authority will use a CSR to create your SSL certificate.

What is a CSR? A CSR or ‘Certificate Signing Request’ is a block of encrypted text, that is generated on the server that the certificate will be used on.

It contains information that will be included in your certificate, such as your organization name, common name (domain name), locality, and country. It also contains the public key that will be included in your certificate.

Run these OpenSSL commands, to generate your Certificate Signing Request.

Step 1: Generate a Private Key

$ openssl genrsa -out shellhacks.com.key 2048

If you need just to renew existence certificate and you already have the private key, you can skip this step and use it, instead of generating new one.

The number 2048 is the size of the key, in bits. Today, 2048 or higher is recommended for RSA keys, as fewer amount of bits is consider insecure or to be insecure pretty soon.

Step 2: Generate the CSR

$ openssl req -new -key shellhacks.com.key -out shellhacks.com.csr

The fields, required in a Certificate Signing Request, are listed below with explanations and examples :