make-ca is a utility to deliver and manage a complete PKI configuration for
workstations and servers using only standard Unix utilities, OpenSSL, and
p11-kit, using a Mozilla cacerts.txt or like file as the trust source. It can
optionally generate keystores for OpenJDK PKCS#12 and NSS if installed. It was
originally developed for use with Linux From Scratch to minimize dependencies
for early system build, but has been written to be generic enough for any Linux
distribution.
The make-ca script will process the certificates included in the certdata.txt
file, and place them in the system trust anchors, for use in multiple
certificate stores. Additionally, any local certificates stored in
/etc/ssl/local will also be imported into the system trust anchors and
certificate stores making it a full trust management utiltiy.
The make-ca script depends on OpenSSL-1.1.0, P11-Kit-0.23, and optionally,
NSS-3.23 (for the MozTrust exetension). Additionally, Coreutils, gawk, and sed
are used. The default locations for output files can be tailored for your
environment via the /etc/make-ca.conf configuration file.
As of version 1.2, a p11-kit helper, copy-trust-modifications, is included
for use in p11-kit's trust-extract-compat script (which should be symlinked
to the user's path as update-ca-certificates). Manual creation of OpenSSL
trusted certificates is no longer needed. Instead, import the certificate
using p11-kit's trust utility, and recreate the individual stores using the
update-ca-certificates script. A copy of any modified anchors will be placed
into $LOCALDIR (in the correct format) by the p11-kit helper script.
For the p11-kit distro hook, remove the "not configured" and "exit 1" lines
from trust/trust-extract-compat.in, and append the following:
===============================================================================
# Copy existing modifications to local store
/usr/libexec/make-ca/copy-trust-modifications
# Generate a new trust store
/usr/sbin/make-ca -f -g
===============================================================================
If you wish to distribute the results of this script as a standalone package,
unlike in the BLFS distribution for which it was originally written, where the
end user is ultimately responsible for the content, you, as the distributor, are
taking ownership for the results. You are strongly encouraged to define a
written inclusion policy, distribute all blacklisted files as a part of the
local directory, and to provide the written policy in the distributed package.
The manual instructions below have been left for reference.
To create an OpenSSL trusted certificate from a regular PEM encoded file,
provided by a CA not included in Mozilla's certificate distribution, you need
to add trust arguments to the openssl command, and create a new certificate.
There are three trust types that are recognized by the make-ca.sh script,
SSL/TLS, S/Mime, and code signing. For example, using the CAcert root, if you
want it to be trusted for all three roles, the following commands will create
an appropriate OpenSSL trusted certificate:
# install -vdm755 /etc/ssl/local &&
# wget http://www.cacert.org/certs/root.crt &&
# openssl x509 -in root.crt -text -fingerprint -setalias "CAcert Class 1 root" \
-addtrust serverAuth -addtrust emailProtection -addtrust codeSigning \
> /etc/ssl/local/CAcert_Class_1_root.pem
If one of the three trust arguments is omitted, the certificate is neither
trusted, nor rejected for that role. Clients that use OpenSSL or NSS
encountering this certificate will present a warning to the user. Clients using
GnuTLS without p11-kit support are not aware of trusted certificates. To
include this CA into the ca-bundle.crt (used for GnuTLS), it must have
serverAuth trust. Additionally, to explicitly disallow a certificate for a
particular use, replace the -addtrust flag with the -addreject flag.
Local trust overrides are handled entirely using the /etc/ssl/local directory.
To override Mozilla's trust values, simply make a copy of the certificate in
the local directory with alternate trust values.
