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+<DRAFT!>
+			HOWTO certificates
+
+1. Introduction
+
+How you handle certificates depends a great deal on what your role is.
+Your role can be one or several of:
+
+  - User of some client application
+  - User of some server application
+  - Certificate authority
+
+This file is for users who wish to get a certificate of their own.
+Certificate authorities should read https://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/ca.html.
+
+In all the cases shown below, the standard configuration file, as
+compiled into openssl, will be used.  You may find it in /etc/,
+/usr/local/ssl/ or somewhere else.  By default the file is named
+openssl.cnf and is described at https://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/config.html.
+You can specify a different configuration file using the
+'-config {file}' argument with the commands shown below.
+
+
+2. Relationship with keys
+
+Certificates are related to public key cryptography by containing a
+public key.  To be useful, there must be a corresponding private key
+somewhere.  With OpenSSL, public keys are easily derived from private
+keys, so before you create a certificate or a certificate request, you
+need to create a private key.
+
+Private keys are generated with 'openssl genrsa -out privkey.pem' if
+you want a RSA private key, or if you want a DSA private key:
+'openssl dsaparam -out dsaparam.pem 2048; openssl gendsa -out privkey.pem dsaparam.pem'.
+
+The private keys created by these commands are not passphrase protected;
+it might or might not be the desirable thing.  Further information on how to
+create private keys can be found at https://www.openssl.org/docs/HOWTO/keys.txt.
+The rest of this text assumes you have a private key in the file privkey.pem.
+
+
+3. Creating a certificate request
+
+To create a certificate, you need to start with a certificate request
+(or, as some certificate authorities like to put it, "certificate
+signing request", since that's exactly what they do, they sign it and
+give you the result back, thus making it authentic according to their
+policies).  A certificate request is sent to a certificate authority
+to get it signed into a certificate. You can also sign the certificate
+yourself if you have your own certificate authority or create a
+self-signed certificate (typically for testing purpose).
+
+The certificate request is created like this:
+
+  openssl req -new -key privkey.pem -out cert.csr
+
+Now, cert.csr can be sent to the certificate authority, if they can
+handle files in PEM format.  If not, use the extra argument '-outform'
+followed by the keyword for the format to use (see another HOWTO
+<formats.txt?>).  In some cases, -outform does not let you output the
+certificate request in the right format and you will have to use one
+of the various other commands that are exposed by openssl (or get
+creative and use a combination of tools).
+
+The certificate authority performs various checks (according to their
+policies) and usually waits for payment from you. Once that is
+complete, they send you your new certificate.
+
+Section 5 will tell you more on how to handle the certificate you
+received.
+
+
+4. Creating a self-signed test certificate
+
+You can create a self-signed certificate if you don't want to deal
+with a certificate authority, or if you just want to create a test
+certificate for yourself.  This is similar to creating a certificate
+request, but creates a certificate instead of a certificate request.
+This is NOT the recommended way to create a CA certificate, see
+https://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/ca.html.
+
+  openssl req -new -x509 -key privkey.pem -out cacert.pem -days 1095
+
+
+5. What to do with the certificate
+
+If you created everything yourself, or if the certificate authority
+was kind enough, your certificate is a raw DER thing in PEM format.
+Your key most definitely is if you have followed the examples above.
+However, some (most?) certificate authorities will encode them with
+things like PKCS7 or PKCS12, or something else.  Depending on your
+applications, this may be perfectly OK, it all depends on what they
+know how to decode.  If not, There are a number of OpenSSL tools to
+convert between some (most?) formats.
+
+So, depending on your application, you may have to convert your
+certificate and your key to various formats, most often also putting
+them together into one file.  The ways to do this is described in
+another HOWTO <formats.txt?>, I will just mention the simplest case.
+In the case of a raw DER thing in PEM format, and assuming that's all
+right for your applications, simply concatenating the certificate and
+the key into a new file and using that one should be enough.  With
+some applications, you don't even have to do that.
+
+
+By now, you have your certificate and your private key and can start
+using applications that depend on it.
+
+-- 
+Richard Levitte