Certificates and certificate authorities
A practical guide to X.509 certificates: what is inside one, how certificate authorities validate and sign them, DV, OV and EV, creating keys and signing requests with OpenSSL, self-signed and private CAs, keystores and truststores in Java, mutual TLS, revocation and renewal.
CodexBash, , 6 min read
Our article on how HTTPS and TLS work explained where certificates fit in the handshake. This one is about the certificates themselves: what is actually inside the file, who is allowed to sign one and why browsers believe them, and the everyday tasks developers and operators face: generating a key and a signing request, creating a certificate for local development, running a private certificate authority for internal services, configuring Java keystores, and avoiding the outage every team eventually has when a certificate quietly expires.
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