Small Python Flask application to generate TLS certificates via API.

There are a lot of options for dynamic certificate generation, most of which use the ACME protocol. These options are often non-trivial to implement. Microcert is designed for lab/development enviroments where you need access to TLS certificates quickly and easily. This project should NOT be used in production. It provides very basic static token authentication and the Certificate Authority private key must be stored unencrypted.

Microcert should use its own Certificate Authority. To start, generate a private key as follows. The key should NOT be protected with a passphrase.

openssl genrsa -out ca.key 4096

Then generate the CA certificate.

openssl req -key ca.key -new -x509 -days 7300 -sha256 -extensions v3_ca -out ca.crt

Follow the prompts and leave Common Name and Email Address blank.

For authentication, a token is passed by the caller to Microcert's API using the Token header. This token is just a random string. To generate one in bash, use the following command. Save the string to a file.

echo $RANDOM | md5sum > /path/to/token

Create a Python virtual environment for the application.

python -m venv /path/to/virtual/environment

Activate the virtual environment.

. /path/to/virtual/environment/bin/activate

Install required Python dependences.

pip install -U -r requirements.txt

To run the Microcert application, pass the required -c/--ca-crt, -k/--ca-key and -t/--token paremeters as follows:

python app.py --ca-crt /path/to/ca.crt --ca-key /path/to/ca.key --token /path/to/token

Microcert has a single API endpoint at the URI /api/certificate. It accepts a JSON object from an HTTP POST with parameters that populate certificate attributes.

The JSON object has the following schema:

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "country_name": {"type": "string"},
        "state_or_provice_name": {"type": "string"},
        "locality_name": {"type": "string"},
        "organization_name": {"type": "string"},
        "organizational_unit_name": {"type": "string"},
        "common_name": {"type": "string"}
    }
}

After successfully invoking the API, a JSON object is returned with the CA used to sign the new certificate and the new certificate's TLS keypair. The return object has the following schema:

{
    "type": "object",
    "properties": {
        "ca.crt": {"type": "string"},
        "tls.crt": {"type": "string"},
        "tls.key": {"type": "string"}
    }
}

An example using curl to invoke the API is shown below:

curl \
  -H "Token: <static-token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST \
  -d '{"country_name":"US","state_or_provice_name":"Virginia","locality_name":"Northern Virginia","organization_name":"UC2 PKI","organizational_unit_name":"UC2 Compute Cloud","common_name":"testing.lab.uc2.io"}' \
  http://localhost:5000/api/certificate