![]() ![]() To start, navigate to the ~/easy-rsa directory on your OpenVPN Server as your non-root user: Once you have a signed certificate, you’ll transfer it back to the OpenVPN server and install it for the server to use. After that you’ll transfer the request over to your CA to be signed, creating the required certificate. Now that your OpenVPN server has all the prerequisites installed, the next step is to generate a private key and Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on your OpenVPN server. ![]() Step 3 - Creating an OpenVPN Server Certificate Request and Private Key The PKI on your VPN server is only used as a convenient and centralized place to store certificate requests and public certificates.Īfter you’ve initialized your PKI on the OpenVPN server, you are ready to move on to the next step, which is creating an OpenVPN server certificate request and private key. Your CA server is solely responsible for validating and signing certificates. Note that on your OpenVPN server there is no need to create a Certificate Authority. Although you already ran this command on the CA server as part of the prerequisites, it’s necessary to run it here because your OpenVPN server and CA server have separate PKI directories: To do so, run the easyrsa script with the init-pki option. Once you have populated the vars file you can proceed with creating the PKI directory. To make the switch from asymmetric to symmetric encryption, the OpenVPN server and client will use the Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) algorithm to agree on a shared secret key as quickly as possible. There is much less computational overhead with symmetric encryption compared to asymmetric: the numbers that are used are much smaller, and modern CPUs integrate instructions to perform optimized symmetric encryption operations. However, when transmitting encrypted VPN traffic, the server and clients use symmetric encryption, which is also known as shared key encryption. Once the file is opened, paste in the following two lines:īackground: When clients connect to OpenVPN, they use asymmetric encryption (also known as public/private key) to perform a TLS handshake. First you will cd into the easy-rsa directory, then you will create and edit the vars file using nano or your preferred text editor. To build a PKI directory on your OpenVPN server, you’ll need to populate a file called vars with some default values. You will use this directory to manage the server and clients’ certificate requests instead of making them directly on your CA server. Step 2 - Creating a PKI for OpenVPNīefore you can create your OpenVPN server’s private key and certificate, you need to create a local Public Key Infrastructure directory on your OpenVPN server. Once these programs are installed and have been moved to the right locations on your system, the next step is to create a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) on the OpenVPN server so that you can request and manage TLS certificates for clients and other servers that will connect to your VPN. As a result, any updates to the easy-rsa package will be automatically reflected in your PKI’s scripts.įinally, ensure the directory’s owner is your non-root sudo user and restrict access to that user using chmod: Note: While other guides might instruct you to copy the easy-rsa package files into your PKI directory, this tutorial adopts a symlink approach.
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