WatchGuard Technologies SSL VPN manual Unencrypting the Private Key, To unencrypt the private key

Unencrypting the Private Key

12Click Next to start the installation.

After Cygwin installs, you can generate the CSR.

These instructions to generate a CSR assume that you are using the Cygwin UNIX environment installed as described in “To install Cygwin” on page 153.

To generate a CSR using the Cygwin UNIX environment

1Double-click the Cygwin icon on the desktop.

A command window opens with a UNIX bash environment.

2To change to a particular drive, use the command: cd driveLetter:

3At the $ prompt, type the following to generate a CSR:

openssl req -new -nodes -keyout privateKeyFilename -out certRequestFilename For example:

openssl req -new -nodes -keyout private.key -out public.csr

Status messages about the private key generation appear. You are prompted for information such as country name.

4When prompted for the Common name, enter the DNS name of the Firebox SSL VPN Gateway. The name that you enter appears on the certificate and must match the name expected by computers that connect to the Firebox SSL VPN Gateway. Thus, if you alias DNS names, you need to use the alias name instead.

5Submit your CSR (public.csr) to an authorized Certificate Authority such as Verisign. When asked for the type of server that the certificate will be used with, select Apache.

Note

If you select “Microsoft,” the certificate might be in PKCS7 format and you will need to follow the procedure in “Converting to a PEM-Formatted Certificate” on page 155 to convert the certificate to a PEM format.

Unencrypting the Private Key

The following procedure is not needed if you use the Cygwin UNIX environment to generate the CSR and private key. Follow this procedure only if the method you use to generate the private key results in an encrypted key.

To unencrypt the private key

1At the $ prompt enter the command: openssl rsa

If you enter this command without arguments, you are prompted as follows: read RSA key

2Enter the name of the password to be encrypted.

You can enter the openssl rsa command with arguments if you know the name of the private key and the unencrypted PEM file.

For example, if the private key filename is my_keytag_key.pvk and the unencrypted filename is keyout.pem, enter openssl rsa -in my_keytag_key.pvk -out keyout.pem.

For more information, see the Open SSL Web site at http://www.openssl.org/docs/apps/rsa.html#EXAM- PLES.

154 Firebox SSL VPN Gateway