4.5. CA Connectors

You can use privacyIDEA to enroll certificates and assign certificates to users.

You can define connections to Certifacte Authorities, that are used when enrolling certificates.

../_images/CA-connectors.png

A local CA definition

When you enroll a Token of type certificate the Certificate Signing Request gets signed by one of the CAs attached to privacyIDEA by the CA connectors.

The first CA connector that ships with privacyIDEA is a connector to a local openSSL based Certificate Authority as shown in figure A local CA definition.

When enrolling a certificate token you can choose, which CA should sign the certificate request.

../_images/enroll-cert.png

Enrolling a certificate token

4.5.1. Local CA Connector

The local CA connector calls a local openssl configuration.

Starting with privacyIDEA version 2.12 an example openssl.cnf is provided in /etc/privacyidea/CA/openssl.cnf.

Note

This configuration and also this description is ment to be as an example. When setting up a productive CA, you should ask a PKI consultant for assistance.

4.5.1.1. Manual Setup

  1. Modify the parameters in the file /etc/privacyidea/CA/openssl.cnf according to your needs.

  2. Create your CA certificate:

    openssl req -days 1500 -new -x509 -keyout /etc/privacyidea/CA/ca.key \
                -out /etc/privacyidea/CA/ca.crt \
                -config /etc/privacyidea/CA/openssl.cnf
    
    chmod 0600 /etc/privacyidea/CA/ca.key
    touch /etc/privacyidea/CA/index.txt
    echo 01 > /etc/privacyidea/CA/serial
    chown -R privacyidea /etc/privacyIDEA/CA
    
  3. Now set up a local CA connector within privacyIDEA with the directory /etc/privacyidea/CA and the files accordingly.

4.5.1.2. Easy Setup

Starting with privacyIDEA version 2.18 it gets easier to setup local CAs.

You can use the pi-manage tool to setup a new CA like this:

pi-manage ca create myCA

This will ask you for all necessary parameters for the CA and then automatically

  1. Create the files for this new CA and
  2. Create the CA connector in privacyIDEA.

4.5.1.3. Management

There are different ways to enroll a certificate token. See Certificates.

When an administrator revokes a certificate token, the certificate is revoked and a CRL is created.

Note

privacyIDEA does not create the CRL regularly. The CRL usually has a validity period of 30 days. I.e. you need to create the CRL on a regular basis. You can use openssl to do so or the pi-manage command.

Starting with version 2.18 the pi-manage command has an additional sub-command ca:

pi-manage ca list

lists all configured CA connectors. You can use the -v switch to get more information.

You can create a new CRL with the command:

pi-manage ca create_crl <CA name>

This command will check the overlap period and only create a new CRL if it is necessary. If you want to force the creation of the CRL, you can use the switch -f.

For more information on pi-manage see The pi-manage Script.

4.5.1.4. Templates

The local CA supports a kind of certificate templates. These “templates” are predefined combinations of extensions and validity days, as they are passed to openssl via the parameters -extensions and -days.

This way the administrator can define certificate templates with certain X.509 extensions like keyUsage, extendedKeyUsage, CDPs or AIAs and certificate validity periods.

The extensions are defined in YAML file and the location of this file is added to the CA connector definition.

The file can look like this, defining three templates “user”, “webserver” and “template3”:

user:
days: 365 extensions: “user”
webserver:
days: 750 extensions: “server”
template3:
days: 10 extensions: “user”