Key Generation and Encryption Examples using OpenSSL

Generating RSA Keys

Generate a 1024-bit RSA private key using a public exponent (e) of 65537 (-F4 option). The key is NOT encrypted with DES (or other ciphers). 

$ openssl genrsa -out privkeyA.pem -F4 1024

The output file (privkeyA.pem) is plaintext. It contains the private key, encoded as Base64, in between two lines indicating the begin and end of the key.

Setting up the Certificate Authority (CA Only)

The CA also has a certificate, which is created from a private key (same as using genrsa above), and a self-signed certificate. Since we don't have a higher-level CA to sign the certificate of our CA, we must sign the CAs certificate ourselve, as follows: 

$ openssl req -new -x509 -key cakey.pem -out cacert.pem -days 1095

CA information can be stored in a set of directories. By default the openssl configration in /usr/lib/ssl/openssl.cnf assumes some directory structure. Hence we need to create it: 

$ mkdir ./demoCA
$ mkdir ./demoCA/certs
$ mkdir ./demoCA/crl
$ mkdir ./demoCA/newcerts
$ mkdir ./demoCA/private
$ touch ./demoCA/index.txt
$ echo 02 > demoCA/serial
$ mv cacert.pem ./demoCA
$ mv cakey.pem ./demoCA/private

The CA's certificate (cacert.pem) is made available to all users.

Requesting a Certificate from CA

Create a certificate request that will be sent to the Certificate Authority (CA). This takes a private key as input (i.e. the file generated above) and produces a .csr certificate request file as output. This is a new certificate request. When prompted for information give the following responses: 

$ openssl req -new -key privkeyA.pem -out certA.csr

Send your certificate request to the CA.

Creating a Certificate (CA Only)

The CA will create a certificate (for the following to work, the appropriate directory structure at the CA must exist; see above): 

$ openssl ca -in certA.csr -out cert-A.pem

and then return your certificate to you.

Verifying a Certificate

Upon receipt of the certificate, you should validate it: 

$ openssl verify -CAfile cacert.pem cert-A.pem
cert-A.pem: OK

If it is OK (and you trust the CA) then you are sure the received certificate came from the CA and was not modified along the way.

Encrypting with RSA

Now lets assume a set of users (A, B, C, ...) have completed the above steps and have their certificates (e.g. cert-A.pem, cert-B.pem). RSA can be used for encrypting (small) files. Consider a message that A wants to confidentially send to B: 

$ cat message.txt
A private message

Now user A encrypts the message using B's public key which is stored in B's certificate: 

$ openssl rsautl -encrypt -certin -inkey cert-B.pem -in message.txt -out ciphertext.ssl

The output file ciphertext.ssl contains the encrypted message in binary: 

$ ls -l ciphertext.ssl
-rw-r--r-- 1 sgordon sgordon 128 2011-01-22 12:22 ciphertext.ssl

Now user B decrypts using their private key: 

$ openssl rsautl -decrypt -inkey privkeyB.pem -in ciphertext.ssl -out decrypted.txt
$ cat decrypted.txt 
A private message

Signing with RSA

The most common application of RSA is to sign messages (as opposed to encrypt them). User A signs a message with their private key: 

$ openssl rsautl -sign -inkey privkeyA.pem -in message.txt -out message.sgn

User B that receives the signed message can verify the signature using A's certificate: 

$ openssl rsautl -verify -in message.sgn -certin -inkey cert-B.pem
A private message

If an incorrect key is used or the message has been modified an error should be reported. First consider a case where the message was signed with

Note to self: Where did the rest of this go?

PDF version of this page, 22 Jan 2011

Created on Sat, 22 Jan 2011, 8:48pm

Last changed on Mon, 03 Nov 2014, 11:02am