13 May 11 OpenSSL on Windows 7

Windows 7 Open SSL

Update:So I got some questions from people about the files to download and use in order to install Open SSL on Windows 7. There are three sources I found when I was looking for it:

• OpenSSL Website
• Shinning Light Production Website
• From Google code – Developed by Dean Lee (This is the version I use)

How to get OpenSSL to work on Windows 7 64bit? Recently working on my wireless project I had to load a third party valid SSL Certificate for the guest web authentication to work. Now in order to do that first step is to generate a CSR – Certificate Signing Request. Cisco WLC does not generate it, so you have to do it and then submit it to a third party such as Verisign or Entrust etc. I downloaded Open SSL for Windows 7 from the source I mentioned above. It is available for Windows as well as Linux, you can use which ever source you prefer. Since I am running Windows 7 64bit on my laptop I downloaded the appropriate version (Make sure you download the zip file for Windows 7 64bit), once you unzip it there is nothing to install simply move the “OpenSSL” folder to your C: Drive.

Next open up your command prompt and follow these steps:

• Change directory to the OpenSSL foler and then switch to the bin folder
• Now type openssl.exe and it will put you at openssl prompt
• Next you will use the following command to start the process, “req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -nodes -keyout mykey.pem -out myreq.pem”
• Now if you get the following error message which I got, “can’t find openssl.cnf” file”, that means you just need to specify the path to the openssl.cnf file.
• So here is what you will type with the path to openssl.cnf, “req -new -newkey rsa:1024 -nodes -config c:\openssl\openssl.cnf -keyout mykey.pem -out myreq.pem”
• Now just follow the prompts to finish generating your CSR – Certificate Signing Request

Tags: Certificate Signing Request, Generating a CSR, open ssl for windows 7, open ssl for windows 7 64 bit, OpenSSL command line, openssl.cnf error, openssl.exe