OpenSSL
OpenSSL provides the cryptographic libraries libcrypto (crypto(7ssl)) and libssl (ssl(7ssl)), as well as the utility openssl(1ssl).
Contents
Installation
Most Linux and BSD distributions offer an openssl package.
Certificates
It is highly recommended to not use openssl(1ssl)-generated certificates for web encryption. Clients have no reason to trust a self-signed certificate unless you
operate your own certificate authority (strongly not recommended)
- configure all client machines
Usage
To generate a certificate and private key simultaneously, try:
openssl req -x509 -nodes -days 365 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /path/to/domain-name.com/key.pem -out /path/to/domain-name.com/cert.pem
Diffie-Hellman Parameters
ssl(7ssl) defaults to 1024-bit keys, which lags behind the modern standard of 2048-bits. This is a particular problem for software that defer cryptographic decisions to ssl(7ssl) at runtime, such as nginx(8). One of the most common cryptographic decisions that is affected by this situation is the selection of parameters for Diffie-Hellman key exchanges.
To generate a stronger configuration, try:
openssl dhparam -out /path/to/dhparam.pem 4096
For details on how to use this configuration, see the following articles for Nginx.
Encrypted Telnet
To test an encrypted connection as with telnet(1), try:
openssl s_client -starttls smtp -connect mail.example.com:587 openssl s_client -connect -connect mail.example.com:465