Creating Long Term SSL Certificates
"It's constantly fascinating for me that something that feels absolutely right one year, 12 months later feels like the wrong thing to do." -- Damian Lewis Often I find myself having to create my own SSL certificates. Be it an internal web-server, or two scripts that need to communicate to each other, SSL is the easiest way to encrypt network traffic. Unfortunately it's also one of the most dangerous encryption methods. If you make a mistake setting it up it usually works ... at least for a little while. Ignoring the client SSL checks for now, (hint if your script is using SSL and it works the first time, you probably are not checking SSL correctly), one area of danger is having your SSL certificates expire. As an example of that, recently every Oculus Rift broke because a code signing certificate expired. Admittedly this was a different type of certificate, but the same thing tends to happen with internal SSL deployments. People do not remember to update them, a