Preparations

Before self-signed certificates can be generated, a few things have to be prepared.

The openssl command line utility is used by the Requesting Party (to create Certificate Signing Requests) and also by the Certificate Authority which then grants the certificates. It can be built manually from source code or installed using the Chocolatey package manager on the command line:

The Certificate Environment page addresses the creation of the folder structure for the different files generated during the process of requesting and signing (i.e. granting) certificates.

Then some Configuration Files have to be saved into the Certificate Environment and adapted to the individual real-world situations.

For the role of the Certificate Authority to be able to sign certificates, a private key and a root certificate are required. How these are created, is described on the Certificate Authority (CA) page.