Creating a CA for mTLS with OpenSSL
In this article I will explain how I created my own certificate authority and issued certificates to use for my Zookeeper setup. Thus, I also go into detail about how to convert certificates to use in a Java application. To give a bit of background, I started working recently on a personal project to deploy Zookeeper on Kubernetes. One feature of Zookeeper that I was interested in is TLS encryption on connections and using mTLS for authentication. I some needed TLS certificates and I decided to roll my own. For an introduction to mTLS, check out this article: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/access-management/what-is-mutual-tls/ I decided that I’m going to use a single CA for all certificates. The advantage of this setup is that I only have to add a single CA certificate to my container images. The drawback is how to handle certificate revokation, for example if a key is compromised or a certificate is decommissioned. This is out of the scope of this article. Creating a CA I...