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My .NET application will be communicating with a third party server application that is implemnted as web-service over SSL. This application will run from different flavours of Windows 7 platform. The server application requires me to generate CSR file. The only way I can find generating a CSR is via IIS but this may not necessarily be installed on all computer where my application will be hosted. Any ideas on how can I generate a CSR on Win 7 platform without using IIS?

Silverlight Student
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  • Both answers http://stackoverflow.com/a/12186368/314104 http://stackoverflow.com/a/6469640/314104 are drastically better answers than http://stackoverflow.com/a/6468801/314104 (which is marked as accepted). – user314104 Jun 07 '14 at 04:02
  • Heroku gives a good overview of how to generate a CSR with OpenSSL - https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/acquiring-an-ssl-certificate#generate-private-key – Steve Eynon Jun 18 '18 at 23:55

3 Answers3

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For a more recent version of openssl...
https://www.openssl.org/community/binaries.html links to
https://wiki.openssl.org/index.php/Binaries which links to
http://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html which has links for win64 and win32 openssl.

Otherwise, you should be able to install openssl v0.98h on windows with this:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/openssl.htm

Run the openssl at the command prompt (Start->Run->"cmd.exe"):
openssl req -out CSR.csr -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout privateKey.key
or you can use this online tool to generate the openssl command:
https://www.digicert.com/easy-csr/openssl.htm

When you run the openssl req command on your computer, it will generate a CSR (with public key embedded) and private key.

velcrow
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  • In my windows install it was openssl.exe, but otherwise that all worked great. I already had openssl installed for work with SSH. Thanks velcrow! – Josiah Nov 21 '12 at 18:45
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Digicert has an easy to use tool for managing certificates on Windows: https://www.digicert.com/util/

If had the capability to generate certificate requests. It will also convert certificates between different formats

Ivan Nikitin
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If you need to generate CSRs from code and you are using some of .NET languages, use BouncyCastle or our SecureBlackbox. They both support certificate requests in PKCS#10 format. For C++ you can probably use OpenSSL.

Eugene Mayevski 'Callback
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