CAcert

Assurer

http://www.pengdows.com/images/cacert-wotseal73.gif

I'm CAcert assurer, able to attribute you up to 35 points as I've 150 points

• I passed the CATS Challenge with 100% (it requires 80%, I did 84% then 84% then 88% then 100% and got bored ;-) )

Misc infos

• What can CAcert provide to you, to increase your privacy and security for free?
• The Education Client Certificate I should use to encrypt my request for an official "paper" certificate (to have passed the test, not a digital certificate!)
  I copied the link here as I could not right-click on their page to save it...
• Get the client certificate out of Firefox/Iceweasel as PKCS #12 backup file and convert it to PEM (here example without pwd for the key!)

openssl pkcs12 -in mycert.p12 -nocerts -nodes -out mycert.key.pem
openssl pkcs12 -in mycert.p12 -clcerts -nokeys -out mycert.crt.pem
openssl pkcs12 -in mycert.p12 -cacerts -nokeys -out mycert.ca.pem

• For server certificates: if using a Class 3 certificate as proposed you'll need the certificate chain file. This is just the Class 3 root certificate and the Class 1 root certificate in PEM format concatenated. Do it yourself or download it from the attachments. Store the certificate chain file in the ssl.crt directory and let's call it CAcert_chain.pem for future reference.
  Now all that remains to be done is to correctly configure Apache's mod_ssl. To use the certificate set the following directives in your SSL-configuration:

SSLCertificateFile <Path to your certificate file>/example_cert.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile <Path to your key file>/example_key.pem
SSLCertificateChainFile <Path to your chain file>/CAcert_chain.pem

• See here for the csr.sh script to generate proper requests
• See Using CACert certificates with OpenVPN

old story

• I tried to get the client certificate out of Firefox/Iceweasel as it repeatedly told me "Failed to create the PKCS #12 backup file for unknown reasons"
  The bug is now solved: #469079: remove libnss3 and keep only libnss3-1d
  

Alternatives

• StartCom Free SSL Certification Authority