community-website/README.md

Browser based client certificate creation

This repository contains an implementation to create a client certificate key store in a modern Web browser.

The implementation uses the excellent node-forge library.

Bootstrap 5 is used for styling the user interface.

This is meant as a replacement for the <keygen> tag that has been removed from browsers.

The following steps have been implemented:

• choose a common name for the subject of the certificate signing request
• generate an RSA key pair with a selectable size
• generate a certificate signing request (PKCS#10 CSR)
• paste the certificate signed by the certificate authority
• build a PKCS#12 (also known as .p12 or .pfx) key store file with a password chosen by the user. That file contains the generated key pair, the client certificate, and the CA certificate chain

The implementation contains the CAcert CA certificates for CA chain building.

Running

1. Install dependencies

   sudo apt install git npm
   

2. Clone the repository

   git clone https://code.cacert.org/cacert/browser-csr-generation.git
   

3. Get dependencies and build assets

   cd browser-csr-generation
   npm install --no-save --user gulp-cli
   npm install
   npm run build
   

4. Open public/index.html in a Web browser

5. Run

   npm run watch
   

   to continuously update the public/index.html when changing src/index.html