How to Create Self-Signed Root Certificate Authority (CA)

Products

• Support Only for Apache HTTP

Issue/Introduction

This article demonstrates how to create our own self-signed root Certificate Authority (CA) that can be used to sign other certificates.

Environment

Resolution

What is a self-signed certificate?
A self-signed certificate is certificate that is signed by itself rather than a well-known and trusted CA's (i.e. commercial vendor) self-signed root CA or intermediate CA. All root CA certificates are self-signed.

Why create our own root CA?
Here are some of the reasons why you would want to create your own root Certificate Authority (CA):

• You want to maintain and distribute our own free certificates without having to pay for certificate signed by a trusted commercial CA.
• You have large number of secure intranet services across your organization that requires certificates, and your users don't mind having to import your root certificate or you can automatically deploy your root certificate across your user base.
• You have large number development servers that don't need commercial trusted CA.

If this is something that would be beneficial for your organization, you can follow the instructions in this excellent article to create your own root CA and certificates signed by the root CA.