I’m gonna show how to run your own CA within pki framework , and be able to generate private keys and sign certificates. We will do this with , just because it’s the fastest way to get it done. vault Download and run Vault: Make sure you get it from or you build it by hand whatever you prefer. https://www.vaultproject.io/downloads.html We will run this in development mode for this tutorial but make sure you do something better if you’re running this in production. vault server -dev That simple , one thing to notice is that you will need to export and env variable to let vault know which vault server to use: export VAULT_ADDR=' http://127.0.0.1:8200' Creating the PKI backend Vault has plug-able backends , so we need to mount the backend we want to use , for that reason: vault mount pkivault mount-tune -max-lease-ttl=87600h pki Generate the Root certificate We will issue certs directly from the root , not using intermediates , so let’s create the root cert that the CA will use: vault write pki/root/generate/internal common_name=internal.com ttl=87600h Keys and certs will be store in the backend Configure CRLs for the CA: vault write pki/config/urls issuing_certificates=" " crl_distribution_points=" " http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/pki/ca http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/pki/crl Creating a Role We gonna create a role like a policy that allows us to generate certs/keys or credentials : vault write pki/roles/jerrycom allowed_domains="jerry.com" allow_subdomains="true" max_ttl="72h" So the policy allows me to generate credentials for the domain jerry.com and it allows the creation of subdomains. Issuing a crt and a private key Finally we get to create the credentials that we will need to use in different services over tls vault write pki/issue/jerrycom common_name=blah.jerry.com From the command above you will get a key and a crt , -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- and -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- If you want to verify if these match , as the crt has been signed with the priv key , save the crt in a file and the key in a different file and run: For the key: openssl rsa -noout -modulus -in vaultkey | md5sum For the CRT: openssl x509 -noout -modulus -in vaultcrt | md5sum You could also load them into nginx and test them with a browser for example . Thank you.

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