Sometimes I need to play around with some digital certificates and I do not feel like shelling out a lot of money each time to buy real ones. Here's how to set up your own CA (certificate authority) in a quick-and-dirty way. Please do not use this guideline to set up a real CA!



The scenario in which I am interested is to set up a single root-CA, which signs the certificates of two sub-authorities. The sub-authorities are the entities that actually sign the end-user certificates. I will create one sub-authority to issue person certificates and one to issue site certificates.



A detailed description of my efforts has been posted.