Certificate Creation

Creating Certificates is a two-step process where a requesting party creates a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) and sends it to a Certificate Authority (CA), and the Certificate Authority creates and signs the requested certificate before issuing it to the Requesting Party.

If an administrator wants to establish a certificate based secure connection between client and server in a trusted environment like an internal network he can fulfill both roles himself. So to generate a certificate he first requests a certificate (from himself) which he then grants (signs) to himself. To avoid confusion resulting from the description of this soliloquy, the processes of Requesting Certificates and Signing Certificates are addressed separately, on individual pages.