Wrapping OpenSSL for Simplified Usage

I routinely inspect live SSL certificates to validate domain coverage. While working directly with openssl is not necessarily painful, I wanted a tool that could be used to return a simple list of domains without the extra output and without the terminal hang. Below is an example of retrieving the SSL cert for google.com with openssl s_client: $ openssl s_client -showcerts -connect google.com:443 CONNECTED(00000003) depth=2 /C=US/O=GeoTrust Inc./CN=GeoTrust Global CA verify error:num=20:unable to get local issuer certificate verify return:0 --- Certificate chain 0 s:/C=US/ST=California/L=Mountain View/O=Google Inc/CN=*....

2015-10-25 · 5 min · 854 words · Nathaniel Hoag

SSL Acrobatics

I flip a lot of websites around between servers, and often haven to migrate SSL certificates as part of the process. The below openssl commands represent most of what I encounter in terms of validations and encoding conversions. Primer First, a couple of basics on certificate components. The four SSL components to know are the Certificate Signing Request (CSR), the key, the certificate, and the Certificate Authority (CA) intermediate certificates. When starting fresh, you’ll first generate a CSR and a key....

2014-01-28 · 3 min · 555 words · Nathaniel Hoag