Secure Sockets Layer

Has anyone set up their own Certificate Authority using OpenCA? I'm looking for something that makes it easy for Windows XP/2000 systems to generate private keys and certificate requests. In particular, this is to make deployment of OpenVPN to multiple (20-100) remote systems as easy as possible, while keeping things as secure.


ElyCA

http://elyca.eurodev.net/ *Note: Link appears down (1/27/2005)

This is another Python based CA, but simpler then OpenCA. It's the easiest to install, and easiest to use as well. Works fine in an OpenVPN environment with a Linux server and Windows clients.


OpenCA

http://www.openca.org/openca/

This one appears to be very mature and robust. However, since it's fairly sophisticated and designed for a clustered server environment servicing thousands of certificates, it seems a bit overkill. So far I haven't been able to find good Debian packages for it.

Here's a cookbook to setting it up in a single server environment, but beware since it assumes things and has some mistakes: http://www.mail-archive.com/openca-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg05421.html

It requires LDAP and MySQL, which is a bit heavy for a VPN/firewall environment.


PyCA

http://www.pyca.de

Python web-based CA management. Has a Debian package and pretty easy to get going. It's pretty easy to use; however after several hours of going through it's code trying to figure out how to sign a request, it appears that that portion of the code was never started.


EJBCA Enterprise Java Beans Certificate Authority

http://ejbca.sourceforge.net/

EJBCA is a fully functional Certificate Authority (CA),written entirely in Java and based on J2EE technology.


NewPKI

http://www.newpki.org/

Written in C++ and based on the OpenSSL low-level API, all the datas are handled through a database. It use a client/server architecture with a nice GTK ? GUI. Run on Linux and Windows. It's promising but still immature.


IDX-PKI

http://idx-pki.idealx.org/index.en.html

An Open Source implementation of IETF PKIX recommendations. It is maintained by IDEALX, software engineering company. Based on OpenLDAP.


SimpleCA

http://www.vpnc.org/SimpleCA/

Limited but very easy to use, it is one of the rare PKI implementations that use the excellent Peter Guttman's cryptlib ? toolkit instead of OpenSSL. Available for Linix, FreeBSD and Windows.


TinyCA

http://tinyca.sm-zone.net/

TinyCA is a simple graphical userinterface written in Perl/Gtk to manage a small CA (Certification Authority). TinyCA works as a frontend for OpenSSL.


See also Apache, NetworkSecurity