Browser PKCS#10 CSR generation PoC

Work that started in this repository will continue at code.cacert.org.

This repository contains a small proof of concept implementation of browser based PKCS#10 certificate signing request and PKCS#12 key store generation using node-forge.

The backend is implemented in Go and utilizes openssl for the signing operations. The instructions below have been tested on Debian 11 (Bullseye). Debian 10 works when you use a manual installation of Go.

Running

1. Install dependencies

   sudo apt install git npm openssl golang-go
   

2. Clone the repository

   git clone https://git.dittberner.info/jan/browser_csr_generation.git
   

3. Get dependencies and build assets

   cd browser_csr_generation
   npm install --user gulp-cli
   npm install
   ./node_modules/.bin/gulp
   

4. Setup the example CA and a server certificate and key

   ./setup_example_ca.sh
   openssl req -new -x509 -days 365 -subj "/CN=localhost" \
     -addext subjectAltName=DNS:localhost -newkey rsa:3072 \
     -nodes -out server.crt.pem -keyout server.key.pem
   

5. Run the Go based backend

   go run main.go
   

   Open https://localhost:8000/ in your browser.

6. Run gulp watch

   You can run a gulp watch in a second terminal window to automatically publish changes to the files in the src directory:

   gulp watch
   

Translations

This PoC uses go-i18n for internationalization (i18n) support.

The translation workflow needs the go18n binary which can be installed via

go get -u  github.com/nicksnyder/go-i18n/v2/goi18n

To extract new messages from the code run

goi18n extract

Then use

goi18n merge active.*.toml

to create TOML files for translation as translate.<locale>.toml. After translating the messages run

goi18n merge active.*.toml translate.*.toml

to merge the messages back into the active translation files. To add a new language you need to add the language code to main.go's i18n bundle loading code

for _, lang := range []string{"en-US", "de-DE"} {
    if _, err := bundle.LoadMessageFile(fmt.Sprintf("active.%s.toml", lang)); err != nil {
        log.Panic(err)
    }
}