Comment on Do you run a private CA? Could you tell me about your certificate setup if you do?
TCB13@lemmy.world 11 months agocould you tell me why one would run this over plain OpenSSL with automation?
Those projects essentially are the automation…
what risks would I run running a private CA? I’d love to know!
…stackexchange.com/…/what-are-the-risks-of-instal…
More or less you’re adding a root certificate to your systems that will effectively accept any certificate issues with your CA’s key. If your PK gets stolen somehow and you don’t notice it, someone might be issuing certificates that are valid for those machines. Also real CA’s also have ways to revoke certificates that are checked by browsers (OCSP and CRLs), they may employ other techniques such as cross signing and chains of trust. All those make it so a compromised certificate is removed and not trusted by anyone.
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I do realise the security problem in keeping the private key safe. I plan to use a VM with encrypted storage underneath. Do you think that’s OK for a homelab, or should I invest time into integrating HSM modules from Nitrokey?
TCB13@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Why are you pushing for your own CA in the first place?
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I would not like to use a public domain for my internal network. By extension, I do not want any public CA to know the domains and subdomains I use in my lab and home network
TCB13@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Okay that’s fair but if your only concern is about “I do not want any public CA to know the domains and subdomains I use” you get around that.
Let’s Encrypt now allows for wildcard so you can probably do something like
*.network.example.organd have an SSL certificate that will cover any subdomain undernetwork.example.org(eg.host1.network.example.org). Or even better, get a wildcard like*.example.organd you’ll be done for everything.I’m just suggesting this alternative because it would make your life way easier and potentially more secure without actually revealing internal subdomains to the CA.
Another option is to just issue certificates without a CA and accept them one at the time on each device. This won’t expose you to a possibly stolen CA PK and you’ll get notified if previously the accepted certificate of some host changes.