Issuing SSL Server Certificate with NSS

Overview

This page describes the process to sign the SSL server CSR and issue the certificate using NSS.

This page assumes an NSS database has been created as follows:

$ echo Secret.123 > password.txt
$ openssl rand -out noise.bin 2048
$ mkdir nssdb
$ certutil -N -d nssdb -f password.txt

It also assumes a CA signing certificate is present in the NSS database.

Issuing SSL Server Certificate

Sign the CSR with the CA signing certificate with the following commands:

$ CA_SKID=...
$ OCSP=...
$ echo -e "y\n\ny\ny\n${CA_SKID}\n\n\n\n2\n7\n${OCSP}\n\n\n\n" | \
   certutil -C \
   -d nssdb \
   -f password.txt \
   -m $RANDOM \
   -a \
   -i sslserver.csr \
   -o sslserver.crt \
   -c "ca_signing" \
   -3 \
   --extAIA \
   --keyUsage critical,dataEncipherment,keyEncipherment,digitalSignature \
   --extKeyUsage serverAuth

It will generate the SSL server certificate in sslserver.crt.

Verification

$ openssl x509 -text -noout -in sslserver.crt

References

• Generating System Certificates

• Generating SSL Server CSR with NSS

• Issuing CA Signing Certificate with NSS

• NSS Database