Creating a self-signed certificate (HTTPS)

[phykell]

I've got a firewall that provides a self-signed certificate. It isn't exactly inspiring so I thought I might provide my own. Obviously I want to do my own certificate as it's far too expensive to have a third party sign one for me, so is there a "best practice" to follow for such things and should I have one for each firewall/server I have?

Thanks for looking

 

[csmager]

Have a look at http://cert.startcom.org

They provide free SSL certificates, and their CA is already trusted by default in the next version of Firefox and Mozilla. IE and others are supposed to follow shortly.

 

[phykell]

Thanks, that looks fine for my company web site but I need one for my hardware firewall appliance. I went down the route of installing OpenSSL and creating my onw self-signed certificate but I got stuck at installation of my certificate because the firewall requires it in PKCS12 format. Basically I have to convert my .cer file to a .p12 file. There's a guide here: http://www.dylanbeattie.net/docs/openssl_iis_ssl_howto.html but it no longer recommends the given method for creating the PKCS12 version of the certificate.