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Requesting an SSL Certificate for your Website

CSAIL (and MIT) server certificates for use with https and other protocols are obtained through the InCommon federation, a project of EDUCAUSE, a trade association for universities. (They also operate the .edu domain.)

Current requirements for server certificates are:

2048-bit RSA keys, or ECDSA keys using NIST P-256 (prime256v1) or P-384 (secp384r1) curve
Common Name must be a valid existing host in the csail.mit.edu domain
Additional names (for the subjectAltName extension) are allowed but must be specified out of band, before the request is submitted

To generate a new key and a new certificate-signing request:

$ umask 077
$ openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout <your hostname>.key -out <your hostname>.csr -nodes
Generating a 2048 bit RSA private key
.+++
...+++
writing new private key to '<your hostname>.key'
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You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) [AU]:
State or Province Name (full name) [Some-State]:
Locality Name (eg, city) []:
Organization Name (eg, company) [Internet Widgits Pty Ltd]:
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:
Common Name (eg, YOUR name) []:<your hostname>
Email Address []:

Please enter the following 'extra' attributes
to be sent with your certificate request
A challenge password []:
An optional company name []:

The only important field in the Distinguished Name is the Common Name, which must be the name of an existing host in the csail.mit.edu domain. All of the other fields of the DN are ignored, so you can just accept the defaults.

You should store the private key on the local disk of the server machine; it should only be readable by the user ID under which your server will be running. If at all possible, leave off the -nodes flag and allow openssl to encrypt the private key for you. (Note that the server will not be able to start automatically if you do this, since you will have to enter a password whenever it is started.)

Store the certificate-signing request in an AFS directory that only you (or other authorized people in your group) have access to, and send a ticket to help@csail to request a certificate. Make sure to include in your request any other virtual-host names that may be used to contact this server.