How do I install a root certificate?

Question

Can anyone point me to a good tutorial on installing a root certificate on ubuntu 10 or 11?

I've been provided with a .crt file. I gather that need to create a directory at /usr/share/ca-certificates/newdomain.org and place the .crt in that directory. Beyond that I'm not sure how to proceed.

Answer 1

Installing a root/CA Certificate

Given a CA ceritificate file 'foo.crt', follow these steps to install it on Ubuntu:

1. Create a directory for extra CA certificates in /usr/share/ca-certificates

   sudo mkdir /usr/share/ca-certificates/extra
   

2. Copy the '.crt' file to the directory

   sudo cp foo.crt /usr/share/ca-certificates/extra/foo.crt
   

3. Add the '.crt' file's path relative to /usr/share/ca-certificates to /etc/ca-certificates.conf

   sudo dpkg-reconfigure ca-certificates
   

4. Update the installed CA's

   sudo update-ca-certificates
   

Answer 2

From here:

Installing the Certificate

You can install the key file example.key and certificate file example.crt, or the certificate file issued by your CA, by running following commands at a terminal prompt:

sudo cp example.crt /etc/ssl/certs
sudo cp example.key /etc/ssl/private

Now simply configure any applications, with the ability to use public-key cryptography, to use the certificate and key files. For example, Apache can provide HTTPS, Dovecot can provide IMAPS and POP3S, etc.

Answer 3

Have the (root / CA) certificate available on a web server, local to your network if you like.

• Browse to it with Firefox.
• Open the cert and tell Firefox to add it as an exception.
• Firefox will ask you whether you want to trust this certificate for identifying websites, for e-mail users or for software publishers.
• Enjoy!

Update: It will be necessary to check if this works on Ubuntu 11. I've realised that I just did this on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.