In any modern organization, there is an important security subsystem called cryptography. This subsystem provides important properties of information security such as confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. All three of these are needed in secure transport, management, and access. Cryptography and security mechanisms built on it are a vast topic and out of the scope of our book. But we are going to briefly demonstrate how to create a certificate system based on OpenSSL.

OpenSSL is a free software utility. You can download a binary copy to run on your Windows installation from https://www.openssl.org/community/binaries.html. OpenSSL is all you need to create your own private certificate authority.

So, download this software and extract in a folder on one of your servers. In our case, we use C:\OpenSSL\ directory on our domain controller (dc.lab.local).

The process for creating our own certificate authority is pretty straightforward: