Once again I need to generate some self signed certs for local development. Installing certificate services in Windows is a bit of an overkill for what I need, however, it would be nice to have a root CA to work with.

After some Googling, I found a site, http://ssl4net.com/ which allows you to create a self signed root CA, and then additional certs signed by the CA you created. It is extremely easy to use and once I got the certs I was able to install them without issue.

My only concern is that the certs do not appear to be encrypted on their server, nor do they use SSL (seems ironic). However, since I will only be using this for internal use, I have no problems with this. I would be a little cautious if I was going to use to verify my identity to other people.

It looks like they might be using open-ssl as the cert creation mechanism, so maybe it’s worth the effort to setting up a VM running linux to generate my own certs in house, but that’s for another day.