Certificates

Introduction

This section is to assist you in the basics of certificates, how to generate them or even a few examples of free Certificate authorities and even some paid ones

Pros and Cons

The pros of securing your home lab with certificates is if you are accessing this via the web you know your data and/or credentials are 'safe' within transit. I use the word safe as this depends on the cipher used and any known vulnerabilities that crop up. For example the heartbleed bug [[1]]

Costs

Free to £$£$ hundreds

Use Cases

The use cases for this type of technology can be used in SSL VPNs, RDP Web Access, Citrix Netscalers, VMware vCenter/Horizon desktops

Known Issues and Solutions

• Self Signed certificates
  • Self signed certficates can be used for free but wont be trusted by any machine outside your domain
• Free CA's
  • There are some free CA's such as https://www.startssl.com/ (no longer issuing as of 1 Jan 2018) or the latest up coming project https://letsencrypt.org/ as well as https://www.sslforfree.com/
• Paid for CA's
  • There are a few common CA's you can use such as https://www.digicert.com or https://ssl.comodo.com/free-ssl-certificate.php who offer a free 90 day trial so you can make sure you are happy