github.com/letsconnectvpn/vpn-ca

Summary: Simple CA intended for use with OpenVPN

Description: Simple CA intended for use with OpenVPN written in Go. It is much simpler to use than easy-rsa and can be run concurrently.

License: MIT

Introduction

Simple CA intended for use with OpenVPN.

Why

We started out using easy-rsa for Let's Connect! / eduVPN. It is a shell script wrapped around the OpenSSL command line. In theory this can be (very) much cross platform, but in practice it was not. Only recent versions fixed some problems on other platforms than Linux.

As part of these fixes they broke backwards compatibility in their 3.x releases, which made "in place" upgrades impossible without (manually) migrating to their new version(s).

We also noticed problems with high volume VPN servers where sometimes the easy-rsa certificate database got corrupted because two threads where running simultaneously.

This was a good moment to think about ditching easy-rsa and come up with something better. Using PHP's OpenSSL binding was out due to its complexity while still lacking basic features.

Go has a rich standard library that has all functionality required for creating a CA, some projects were available doing exactly that as shown above. Using those for inspiration, and some borrowing, stripping everything we didn't need resulted in a tiny CA that does exactly what we need and nothing more with a very simple CLI API. Implementing a PHP extension seemed like overkill, so we simply use the CLI from PHP.

Platform Support

We tested on Linux, OpenBSD, macOS and Windows. It works everywhere!

Build

Use the Makefile:

$ make

Or manually:

$ go build -o _bin/vpn-ca vpn-ca/main.go

Usage

Initialize the CA (valid for 5 years) with an RSA key of 3072 bits:

$ _bin/vpn-ca -init-ca -name "My Root CA"

Generate a server certificate, valid for 1 year:

$ _bin/vpn-ca -server -name vpn.example.org

Generate a client certificate, valid for 1 year:

$ _bin/vpn-ca -client -name 12345678

Generate client certificate and specify explicitly when it expires:

$ _bin/vpn-ca -client -name 12345678 -not-after 2020-12-12T12:12:12+00:00

The -not-after flag can be used with both -client and -server.

If you want to expire a certificate at the exact same time as the CA, you can use -not-after CA.

NOTE: if your -not-after, or the default of 1 year when not specified, extends beyond the lifetime of the CA an error will be thrown! You should either reduce the certificate lifetime, or generate a new CA.

There is also the CA_DIR environment variable you can set if you do not want to use the current directory from which you run the CA command to store the CA, server and client certificates, e.g.

$ CA_DIR=/tmp _bin/vpn-ca -init-ca -name "My Root CA"
$ CA_DIR=/tmp _bin/vpn-ca -server  -name vpn.example.org
$ CA_DIR=/tmp _bin/vpn-ca -client  -name 12345678

Algorithms

The CA supports these key types / signature algorithms:

* `RSA` (3072 bits)
* `ECDSA` (P-256 / prime256v1)
* `EdDSA` (Ed25519)

You can use the environment variable CA_KEY_TYPE to select the type of key that will be generated. You can use RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA as values to CA_KEY_TYPE. RSA is the default if you do not specify anything. For example with ECDSA:

$ CA_KEY_TYPE=ECDSA _bin/vpn-ca -init-ca -name "My P-256 CA"
$ CA_KEY_TYPE=ECDSA _bin/vpn-ca -server  -name "www.example.org"

Or with EdDSA:

$ CA_KEY_TYPE=EdDSA _bin/vpn-ca -init-ca -name "My Ed25519 CA"
$ CA_KEY_TYPE=EdDSA _bin/vpn-ca -server  -name "www.example.org"

If at all possible in your situation, use EdDSA. It is the most modern, secure and fast algorithm. However, not all software supported EdDSA yet. Modern browsers do NOT support EdDSA certificates. When using TLS, at least TLSv1.3 is necessary. With OpenSSL, one needs OpenSSL >= 1.1.1.

OpenVPN, for example supports EdDSA just fine with TLSv1.3 on modern systems.