PKI-Playground README.md

Introduction

This is the documentation for a Python 3 script that is used to generate self-signed certificates. The script is named pki_playground.py, and this documentation explains its usage and functionality.

Usage

To use pki_playground.py, you can run it from the command line as follows.

Unlocking the repository

The ./pkis directory in this repository is locked by default via git-crypt. The key for the git-crypt is by default encrypted with AES-256 algorithm.

To get access this repository type as follows:

sudo apt-get update && apt-get install git-crypt
sudo python3 pki_playground.py --unlock KEY

This command will decrypt the shipped with this repository git-crypt key and unlock the pkis/ directory.

Setting up the docker environment

If you don't want to install the required packages on your host machine, there's an option to build the docker environment:

$ docker build . -t sirin_pki_playground
$ ./docker-emit.sh

Will launch the interactive session in the docker container, and mount the root of this repository.

Initialing the PKI

After this, you need to initialize the PKI toolchain by entering the following command:

sudo python3 pki_playground.py --pki-init PKI_NAME 

This will initialize the root CA/CN with the provided name.

Creating the server certificates(based on created PKI)

To create the server certificates, you need to explicitly specify the root certificates(PKI) name as follows:

sudo python3 pki_playground.py --create-server-cert PKI_NAME DOMAIN_NAME

This will create the server certificates that are based on the PKI with the provided name.

Managing deployments

After that, you need to create the so-called deployment, which is a docker-compose file and the text, that will be temoparily added to the /etc/hosts file. To do this, type as follows:

sudo python3 pki_playground.py --create-deployment DEPLOYMENT_NAME HTTPS_PORT PKI_NAME DOMAIN_NAME 

This will initialise the deployments/DEPLOYMENT_NAME directory in the root of the repository, and create docker-compose.yaml and the host_additions files.

To execute the deployment proceed with the following commands:

sudo python3 pki_playground.py --start-deployment DEPLOYMENT_NAME