Hi, I was looking at private CAs since I don’t want to pay for a domain to use in my homelab.
What is everyone using for their private CA? I’ve been looking at plain OpenSSL with some automation scripts but would like more ideas. Also, if you have multiple reverse-proxy instances, how do you distribute domain-specific signed certificates to them? I’m not planning to use a wildcard, and would like to rotate certificates often.
Thanks!
Edit: thank you for everyone who commented! I would like to say that I recognise the technical difficulty in getting such a setup working compared to a simple certbot setup to Let’s Encrypt, but it’s a personal choice that I have made.
My apologies, I didn’t word my concerns properly in the moment. I would like to run a private CA simply because I do not want to use a public domain for my internal network. It makes me deeply uncomfortable to use a public domain and get public certificates for something inherently so private (it’s more philosophical than technical, although I suppose that’s where a lot of opinionated technical decisions come from anyway). Your solution is elegant and simple, but I really do want to do it completely internally, and move towards zero trust security practices as I do. Basically, I want to start training myself on the security side of SRE in my lab, running services which matter to me and working like the more paranoid SRE teams in corporations work…I know this sounds like fantasy, and my needs might change going forward, but I’m also hoping to learn a lot from this and hopefully make this as robust as I can. Having a good security posture makes me feel warm inside :)
It makes me deeply uncomfortable to use a public domain and get public certificates for something inherently so private
You can obviously run your own CA, great exercise but why? What really makes you that uncomfortable? Once you go with the wildcard nobody will know about your internal hosts or whatever. Even if the domain is taken down, you’re offline or wtv your local DNS server will still be able to serve replies to those internal subdomains. You don’t need to publish those subdomains (A records) in a public DNS server, just on your own internal DNS server.
I guess if you rally want to take the CA route those tools I provided before are the best option. Simply issuing a certificate (without a CA) and allowing it on a browser might also work for you - less risks of stolen PK as described.
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My apologies, I didn’t word my concerns properly in the moment. I would like to run a private CA simply because I do not want to use a public domain for my internal network. It makes me deeply uncomfortable to use a public domain and get public certificates for something inherently so private (it’s more philosophical than technical, although I suppose that’s where a lot of opinionated technical decisions come from anyway). Your solution is elegant and simple, but I really do want to do it completely internally, and move towards zero trust security practices as I do. Basically, I want to start training myself on the security side of SRE in my lab, running services which matter to me and working like the more paranoid SRE teams in corporations work…I know this sounds like fantasy, and my needs might change going forward, but I’m also hoping to learn a lot from this and hopefully make this as robust as I can. Having a good security posture makes me feel warm inside :)
You can obviously run your own CA, great exercise but why? What really makes you that uncomfortable? Once you go with the wildcard nobody will know about your internal hosts or whatever. Even if the domain is taken down, you’re offline or wtv your local DNS server will still be able to serve replies to those internal subdomains. You don’t need to publish those subdomains (A records) in a public DNS server, just on your own internal DNS server.
I guess if you rally want to take the CA route those tools I provided before are the best option. Simply issuing a certificate (without a CA) and allowing it on a browser might also work for you - less risks of stolen PK as described.
I hope the links and tips helped you in some way.
Thanks!