Generating a Self Signed Root Certificate

If you need instruments to communicate with a server over secured connection (TLS), you'll need to have a root certificate. Your company might have such a certificate and be able to provide you with it for connecting your clients. However, if you are deploying a server on a machine that is on your local network and you use it internally, it is very likely that the domain you connect to does not have a Trusted Certificate emitted by a verified authority (VeriSign, etc.)

If this is the case, you want to be your own "authority" to make sure your clients connect to the actual server you are targetting. To do this, you'll need to generate self-signed certificates.

A typical use case for LabVIEW developers is to have a bunch of compactRIOs, for example, that are spread across the domain. You want to have certificates for your servers. To help you with this, the LabVIEW Certification Authority is a great helping hand.

1- Install the VIP package from the VIPM Community Repository 2- Run the Utility from the Tools menu 3- Follow the steps to install the Cloudflare SSL executable at the correct place 4- Generate a root certificate (and reuse it to generate server certificates and keys later on) 5- Provide a common name and hostnames for each of your servers. 6- The utility will generate the chain of trusted certificates to use with your server-client architecture