ERROR: "Problem making Certificate Request 4004:error:0D07A097" creating Sample SSL certificates for XCOM

Products

• XCOM Data Transport
• XCOM Data Transport - Windows
• XCOM Data Transport - Linux PC
• XCOM Data Transport - z/OS

Issue/Introduction

When generating SSL certificates using XCOM supplied sample scripts (makeca, makeclient, makeserver) you can get "error:0D07A097"

The message you get looks like:

Problem making Certificate Request
4004:error:0D07A097:asn1 encoding routines: ASN 1_mbstring-copy:string too long:.\cyryptoasn1\a-mbstr.c:154:maxsize=2.

Environment

• XCOM™ Data Transport® for z/OS
• XCOM™ Data Transport® for Windows
• XCOM™ Data Transport® for UNIX/Linux PC
• OpenSSL

Cause

If the countryName-value in the .conf-file's distinguished name section is a string other than exactly 2 characters long you will get this error, because what the OpenSSL certificate-building routine expects here is an ISO country code. For every country, ISO -3166 defines a 2-char country code (see the links below).

Resolution

Specify a countryName value in the format of a 2 character ISO country code

ISO 3166 Country Codes

ISO3166 Wikipedia