pfSense

upon further investigation, i see that the crt was not saved.

here's a bit of the config file.

<descr><![CDATA[walden]]></descr>
                <caref>4d460d3298bb2</caref>
                <crt/>
                <prv>I REMOVED THIS ONE THE OTHER ONE IS BLANK</prv>
        </cert>

the title of this bug should be "certificate file is not properly generated or saved." using internal cert auth

Seems to be related to importing of a certificate authority.

To isolate a bit... I created an internal certificate authority and generated a cert.
This one looks fine.

I still cannot create certs when i choose the pre-existing cert authority that I created outside of pfsense
(using openssl/tinyca2)

I looked for some kind of log to show what commands php is trying to run, but didn't find one.
How can i help debug this problem?

When you imported the CA, did you import both the cert and private key of the CA?

All of the certificates are made in certs.inc. The code is laid out pretty well there, shouldn't be hard to see what commands are run.

One more clarification...
I just checked and see that the private key is encrypted, so cert signing must fail since it never asks for a password.

• ask for a password before attempting to sign a new cert (my favorite option)
• don't allow encrypted private keys (probably not a great idea), and reject an invalid key during import
• don't allow creation of new certs if no usable key is available for the selected cert

Certificate generation works if I paste in the unencrypted ca key, though this strikes me as a poor security practice.
At minimum, I think the user should be notified if the a new cert cannot be generated.

I made a preliminary PR that adds support for encrypted private keys to the CA, certificate, and user managers.
Would love to get some feedback: https://github.com/pfsense/pfsense/pull/4062