This page will detail how to use OpenSSL to create a Certificate Authority and how to generate a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate for use with a web server such as Apache Tomcat. This is useful when you need to use SSL on a local development machine. As a general rule of thumb, if you need an SSL certificate for use on either a production or non-production instance, you should contact your organization's IT team to obtain a certificate that will work properly in your environment.

The following link describes the steps for creating a Certificate Authority using OpenSSL. Read the introduction and follow the instructions that are detailed in create-the-root-pair and then create-the-intermediate-pair. For those using Windows, please note that you will need to modify the configuration files (openssl.cnf) that are referenced in the article since the paths are specific to Linux. For example, here is how the [CA_default] section would look for Windows:

[ CA_default ]
# Directory and file locations.
dir               = C:\\<your directory>\\root\\ca
certs             = $dir\\certs
crl_dir           = $dir\\crl
new_certs_dir     = $dir\\newcerts
database          = $dir\\index.txt
serial            = $dir\\serial
RANDFILE          = $dir\\private\\.rand

Note the change to the dir setting to include the full path to the root/ca folder that is created along with the changes to the $dir settings to use a double backslashes \\ instead of a single foward slash '/'.