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My experience is it’s really a lot of work and with the prevalence of letsencrypt, there is not a lot of automated setups for this use case (at least that I have been able to find). It is kind of a pain in the ass to run your own CA, especially if you plan to not use wildcard and to rotate certs often. If you use tailscale, they offer https certs with a subdomain given to you:
[server-name].[tailnet-name].ts.net
That’s honestly what I’m moving towards.
I realise that it is more work than using Let's Encrypt, but this is a personal choice I'm making to not use a public domain for my internal network. I also do not like the idea of tailscale having access to my domain names, but then again, I'm likely not going to use Tailscale at all.
No judgement here. I think it’s a worthy goal just not one I am particularly interested in at this point. Maybe if the automation was a bit easier and the mobile device management was easier I might join you.
From where I sit, not a lot of reason to do it. It’s a bigger pain to deal with your own CA than to just use LE.
I'd just buy a single domain, it's like £5 a year and use a letsencrypt wildcard and have it auto renew via DNS challenges. Very easy. You can do what you're doing with letsencrypt, but you'll have to set up HTTP challenges for each sub domain, or DNS challenges for each sub domain. Obviously doable, but more work.
Doing it without letsencrypt and just doing it privately? I dunno if I'd bother with that, firstly you'll have to go through the hassle of making sure any browser and computer that connects to it has the root cert of the private CA, or you'll get self signed errors, which is a faff. I'd honestly just pay the £5 or so a year, you'll spend more time (and time is ultimately money) doing it without it.
As someone who has done both I couldn't agree more.
I run Home Assistant and could just pay their subscription to get external access, which also supports development. But I'm a cheap Yorkshireman so I went with DuckDNS, Let's Encrypt, Nginx and all that jazz for a long time. I'm just trying to hook my home up to Google so I can talk to it, I don't wanna pay money!
I had so many bloody glitches! I'd have to sign things in on a weekly basis, Google lost access all the damn time and it was just a nuisance.
I have a rule for hobbies, I do it cheap for at least a few months to see if I lose interest. If I get a bit obsessive, it's worth spending money on the hobby.
So after a year or two of fucking around with Nginx and DuckDNS I found the cloudflare plugin, which worked for free for a while. It was night and day, everything remained connected!
It ultimately bugged out one day and I decided to just bite the bullet and buy a domain. It's a hobby I've invested enough time in that a few quid for a solution that just works is worth it.
I think I dropped £35 for 5 years (I forget, it might be a decade) of owning my own .com domain name, which cloudflare manages for me.
I now have to reconnect my Google home to my home assistant once every couple of months instead of every week.
I haven't missed the money, and I certainly haven't missed the fucking tinkering to get it to work.
If you want to run your own pki with self-signed certificate in your homelab I really encourage you to read through this tutorial. There is a lot to process and read and it will take you some time to set everything up and understand every terminology but after that:
After everything is in place, you can write your own script that revoks, write and generates your certificate, but that is another story !
Put everything behind your reverse proxy of choice (traefik in my case) and serve all your docker services with your own self-signed wildcard certificates ! It's complex but if you have spare time and are willing to learn something new, it's worth the effort !
Keep in mind to never expose such certificates on the wild wild west ! Keep those certificate in a closed homelab you access through a secure tunnel on your LAN !
Always take notes, to keep track of what you did and how you solved some issues and always make some visuals to have a better understanding on how things work !
never expose such certificates on the wild wild west ! Keep those certificate in a closed homelab you access through a secure tunnel on your LAN !
I'm curious, what's the reason?
In many architectures in which certificates are used, a client with a valid certificate is a trusted client, so a certificate falling into the wrong hands is problematic.
Thank you. Could you explain a bit more about your setup and the aspects I should be looking at? Specifically:
Thanks for the mention, I was looking at a script to automate certificate generation and revocation too.
Since we're talking about reverse-proxies, I'll mention that I plan to run an instance of HAProxy per podman pod so that I terminate my encrypted traffic inside the pod and exclusively route unencrypted traffic through local host inside the pod. I'm doing this because I do not want to see any unencrypted traffic in my network. Of course, this is some more overhead but I think this is doable. I got this idea from another post I made a while back. Of course, that means that every pod on my network (hosting an HAProxy instance) will be given a distinct subdomain, and I will be producing certificates for specific subdomains, instead of using a wildcard.
Thanks, I'll be sure to document my progress as I go.
Certificate chain of trust: I assume you’re talking about PKI infrastructure and using root CAs + Derivative CAs? If yes, then I must note that I’m not planning to run derivative CAs because it’s just for my lab and I don’t need that much of infrastructure.
An intermediate CA could potentially be useful, but isn't really needed in self-signed CA. But in case you have to revoke your rootCA, you have to replace that certificate on all your devices, which can become a lot of hassle if you share that trusted root CA with family/friends. By having a intermediate CA and hiding your root CAs private key somewhere offline, you could take away that overheat by just revoking the intermediate CA and updating the server certificate with the newly signed Intermediate bundle and serving that new certificate through the proxy. (Hope that makes sense? :|)
I do not know what X.509 extensions are and why I need them. Could you tell me more?
This will probably give you some better explanation than I could :| I have everything written in a markdown file, and reading through my notes I remember I had to put some basic constraints TRUE in my certificates to make them work on my android root store ! Some are necessary to make your root CA work properly (like CA:True). Also if you want SAN certificates (multidomaine) you have to put them in your x509 extensions.
’m also considering client certificates as an alternative to SSO, am I right in considering them this way?
Ohhh, I don't know... I haven't installed or used any SSO service and thinking of MFA/SSO with authelia in the future ! My guess would be that those are 2 different technologies and could work together? Having self-signed CA with a 2FA could possible work in a homelab but I have no idea how because I haven't tested it out. But thinks to consider if you want clients certificates for your family/friends is to have a intermediate CA in case of revocation, you don't have to replace the certificate in their root store every time you sign a new Intermediate CA.
I’ll mention that I plan to run an instance of HAProxy per podman pod so that I terminate my encrypted traffic inside the pod and exclusively route unencrypted traffic through local host inside the pod.
I have no idea about HAProxy and podman and how they work to encrypt traffic. All my traffic passes through a wireguard tunnel to my docker containers/proxy which I consider safe enough? Listening to all my traffic with wireshark seamed to do exactly what I'm expecting but I'm not an expert :L So I cannot help you further on that topic. But I will keep your idea in my notes to see If there could be further improvement in my setup with HAProxy and podman compared to docker and traefik through wireguard tunnel.
Of course, that means that every pod on my network (hosting an HAProxy instance) will be given a distinct subdomain, and I will be producing certificates for specific subdomains, instead of using a wildcard.
Openssl SAN certificates are going to be a life/time saver in your setup ! One certificat with multidomian !
I'm just a hobby homelaber/tinkerer so take everything with caution and always double check with other sources ! :) Hope it helps !
Thinking of your use case I would personally create a rootCA and an intermediateCA + certificate bundle. Put the rootCA in the trusted store on all your devices and serve the intermediateCA/certificate bundle with your proxy of choice. Signing the certificate with SAN X.509 extension for all your domains. Save your rootCA's key somwhere offline to keep it save !
The links I gave you are very useful but every bit of information is a bit dispatched and you have to combine them by yourself, but it's a gold mine of information !
Thank you for your comment. My apologies in replying so late.
After reading a bit more and thinking about my setup, I think I will run intermediate CAs. Specifically, because I want to set up an ad-hoc mTLS setup, I might keep intermediate CAs for different classes of devices/different purposes. I will need to delve deeper into it, but for now, I think I have a grasp on the idea I need to implement, in which case, intermediate CAs will likely be a better idea. Thank you.
Thanks for the material, it would seem that I have a lot of reading left to do :)
Hey don't worry :)
Yeah, this could be a time saver in case you should/need to revoke certificates in your homelab setup ! Imagine changing the rootCA store on 20 devices ... Ugh !
Happy reading/tweaking ! Have fun !
Hmm, I think I'm a bit confused now.
Let's say I have 2 intermediary CAs: one to create certificates for my servers (going to be reverse-proxies + a couple of VMs), and one for my clients (Android devices, maybe a linux machine).
I'm planning to rotate both CAs on a bi-weekly schedule, and rotate the root CA every 6 months. In which case, wouldn't I have to insert new certificates into my servers every time I rotate the intermediary "server" CA, and the same for my clients when I rotate the "client" CA? If I don't do that, won't I get SSL errors every time I try to access something because the certificate expired?
I’m using step-ca. Its running on dedicated SBC. ACME certs created for each service renewing automatically daily. Honestly this setup wouldn’t be worth it if it wasn’t for daily cert rotation. I’m not using wildcard certs with own CA as it’s bad practice and defeats the purpose. There are bunch of different ACME renewal scripts/services. K8s cert manager handling kubernetes services automatically. Opensense has ACME cert plugin, nginx proxy manager is using external cert managed by script. I’m validating certs with DNS using TSIG. Step-ca have several integrations with different DNS services. I chose TSIG because it’s universal. There is pi-hole integration if you using that. Buying valid domain is not needed as long as you have internal DNS. You need to Install root Ca on every machine that will be connecting to services. If you have many VM’s configuration management is the way to go.
Thank you, and yes, I agree. Frequent certificate cycling and revocations is one of best parts of having a private CA, along with particular certificates for particular domains. With that said: Could you tell me more about TSIG? This is the first time I have come across it, and 2 seconds of reading tells me that it is used to validate automated updates and zone transfers for the DNS server, and also to validate domains? I didn't think of this avenue before, but it seems very interesting to implement.
And yes, I will have an internal DNS, and I will be inserting the Root CA certificate on all of my client devices.
Use something like no-ip, you can get a domain for free and renewing it every 30 days with a few clicks is much easier then managing a CA.
The only downside is the TLD but if you don't care to much about how your domain name looks it really is the best option.
I use no-ip with letsencrypt, the LE bot does the certificate stuff for me, I use a single domain with different ports for each service and no-ip sends an email every 30 days to reconfirm the domain. Simple and easy.
I would not like to use a public domain for my internal traffic, even if the traffic is not routed outside. This is more of a personal choice than me looking for the easiest technical solution. I do own a domain, but I'll keep that specifically for elements facing the internet.
Thanks!
Written in go, very small and portable: https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert. There's also step-ca, bigger and uses ACME to deploy certificates, never used it tho.
Just be awake of the risks involved with running your own CA.
Thanks, could you tell me why one would run this over plain OpenSSL with automation? Also, what risks would I run running a private CA? I'd love to know!
could you tell me why one would run this over plain OpenSSL with automation?
Those projects essentially are the automation...
what risks would I run running a private CA? I’d love to know!
More or less you're adding a root certificate to your systems that will effectively accept any certificate issues with your CA's key. If your PK gets stolen somehow and you don't notice it, someone might be issuing certificates that are valid for those machines. Also real CA's also have ways to revoke certificates that are checked by browsers (OCSP and CRLs), they may employ other techniques such as cross signing and chains of trust. All those make it so a compromised certificate is revoked and not trusted by anyone after the fact.
I do realise the security problem in keeping the private key safe. I plan to use a VM with encrypted storage underneath. Do you think that's OK for a homelab, or should I invest time into integrating HSM modules from Nitrokey?
I don't at the moment, because I don't have a need for it, but I did for a while run a PoC with Step CA, and that seems like the easiest way to get up and running, even if its features are overkill for a home lab.
Step CA is really nice if you want to learn more about how a real CA works. Had some fun playing with it but yeah it's a bit overkill for home lab xD.
You can achieve the same result with openssl with less complexity !
I'm not using a private CA for my internal services, just plain self-signed certs. But if I had to, I would probably go as simple as possible in the first time: generate the CA cert using ansible, use ansible to automate signing of all my certs by the CA cert. The openssl_* modules make this easy enough. This is not very different from my current self-signed setup, the benefit is that I'd only have to trust a single CA certificate/bypass a single certificate warning, instead of getting a warning for every single certificate/domain.
If I wanted to rotate certificates frequently, I'd look into setting up an ACME server like [1], and point mod_md or certbot to it, instead of the default letsencrypt endpoint.
This still does not solve the problem of how to get your clients to trust your private CA. There are dozens of different mechanisms to get a certificate into the trust store. On Linux machines this is easy enough (add the CA cert to /usr/local/share/ca-certificates/*.crt, run update-ca-certificates), but other operating systems use different methods (ever tried adding a custom CA cert on Android? it's painful. Do other OS even allow it?). Then some apps (Web browsers for example) use their own CA cert store, which is different from the OS... What about clients you don't have admin access to? etc.
So for simplicity's sake, if I really wanted valid certs for my internal services, I'd use subdomains of an actual, purchased (more like renting...) domain name (e.g. service-name.internal.example.org), and get the certs from Let's Encrypt (using DNS challenge, or HTTP challenge on a public-facing server and sync the certificates to the actual servers that needs them). It's not ideal, but still better than the certificate racket system we had before Let's Encrypt.
I run a crude automation on top of OpenSSL CA. It checks for certain labels attached to kubernetes services. Based on that it creates kubernetes secrets containing the generated certificates.
I run easy-rsa on a linux box. Just manually generate CSR's and sign them via SSH.
And simply trust the CA cert in windows, linux and whatever extra places (normally firefox cert store).
Post the crl.pem to /var/www/html/ and let NGINX use that.
For most things public like plex or whatever i just use letsencrypt. Easy-rsa is really just for internal stuff like my NAS, VPN etc.
Just manually generate CSR’s and sign them via SSH.
Could you tell me what you mean by "signing with SSH"?
Copy them to the box. Sign them. Copy the cert file off the box back to the requester.
Self-host your own ACME server. Then you can use certbot pointed there.
These instructions are old so not sure if newer/better ways, https://blog.sean-wright.com/self-host-acme-server/
I run a private CA for client SSL.
For traditional server SSL I just use let's encrypt, although I already have the domain (less than $10 a year) for my public facing stuff, and just use a subdomain of that one for my homelab.
I have a container with openssl for the private CA and generating user certs as well as renewing the let's encrypt ones. I just use openssl without anything fancy.
The output folder is only mounted rw in that one container
I only ever mount the subfolders in read-only in other containers that need those certs.
All these containers are running on the same server so I don't even have to copy anything around, the containers don't even need connectivity between them, it's just mounted where needed.
I'd be very interested to hear your reasoning behind using a private CA for clients but using Let's encrypt for servers. Thanks for the explanation on the OpenSSL setup!
I'm just doing mutual TLS to authenticate clients which I use the pricate CA for.
I could use the orivate CA for the server instead of lets encrypt and trust that on devices, but letsencrypt is easy enough and useful for other things that I open publicly. mTLS avoids needing a vpn for more sensitive services
Did you design your lab infrastructure to operate in a zero trust security framework? I'm very interested; I never really grasped mTLS, but I'm going to try and read more about it. Thanks!
Edit: Alright, I understand the high-level concept of mTLS. Just need to check the implementation details with my reverse-proxy
Not really, although now that I have certs for those anyway, maybe I should.
More like I'm using some services on the go that I want to always work, whether I'm on the LAN or on the go.
Opening home automation or 3d printers to the Internet is unwise to say the least.
mTLS in the reverse proxy for those allows me to have more security without having to establish a VPN first.
Oh, that's a great idea! Indeed, using certificates to identify yourself would work quite well in such a scenario. Whilst I would always use a VPN server, this has given me something new to think about! Thanks!
What's nice is it provides a similar level of protection to using a VPN with PKI, but just for that specific subdomain. While a VPN would be have to be connected manually before use (or all the time), this is built-in.
The odds of someone breaking through the mTLS and breaking through that application's security at the same time are much smaller than either separately.
If you don't have a valid cert, you're dropped by the reverse proxy before anything even gets passed to the server behind it.
I'm a big fan of it.
I'll take a look, thanks!
I do have Vault PKI set up but I don't use it that much. It's only if I want to do mTLS with something.
For almost all of my actual services, I use a wildcard cert that covers something like *.int.example.com. I use acme.sh to create and renew the cert then have a python script that copies it to any vms or services that need it
Why bother with certificate rotation in a homelab environment? You could issue certificates for three years and just call it a day.
Personally, I have experience with Microsoft Certificate Services, which works pretty well out of the box and is also quite well supported. But you need a Windows Server for it.