README.md

Certipy

A simple python tool for creating certificate authorities and certificates on the fly.

Introduction

Certipy was made to simplify the certificate creation process. To that end, Certipy exposes methods for creating and managing certificate authorities, certificates, signing and building trust bundles. Behind the scenes Certipy:

• Manages records of all certificates it creates
  • External certs can be imported and managed by Certipy
  • Maintains signing hierarchy
• Persists certificates to files with appropriate permissions

Usage

Command line

Creating a certificate authority:

Certipy defaults to writing certs and certipy.json into a folder called out in your current directory.

$ certipy foo
FILES {'ca': '', 'cert': 'out/foo/foo.crt', 'key': 'out/foo/foo.key'}
IS_CA True
SERIAL 0
SIGNEES None
PARENT_CA

Creating and signing a key-cert pair:

$ certipy bar --ca-name foo
FILES {'ca': 'out/foo/foo.crt', 'key': 'out/bar/bar.key', 'cert': 'out/bar/bar.crt'}
IS_CA False
SERIAL 0
SIGNEES None
PARENT_CA foo

Removal:

certipy --rm bar
Deleted:
FILES {'ca': 'out/foo/foo.crt', 'key': 'out/bar/bar.key', 'cert': 'out/bar/bar.crt'}
IS_CA False
SERIAL 0
SIGNEES None
PARENT_CA foo

Code

Creating a certificate authority:

from certipy import Certipy

certipy = Certipy(store_dir='/tmp')
certipy.create_ca('foo')
record = certipy.store.get_record('foo')

Creating and signing a key-cert pair:

certipy.create_signed_pair('bar', 'foo')
record = certipy.store.get_record('bar')

Creating trust:

certipy.create_ca_bundle('ca-bundle.crt')

# or to trust specific certs only:
certipy.create_ca_bundle_for_names('ca-bundle.crt', ['bar'])

Removal:

record = certipy.remove_files('bar')

Records are dicts with the following structure:

{
  'serial': 0,
  'is_ca': true,
  'parent_ca': 'ca_name',
  'signees': {
    'signee_name': 1
  },
  'files': {
    'key': 'path/to/key.key',
    'cert': 'path/to/cert.crt',
    'ca': 'path/to/ca.crt',
  }
}

The signees will be empty for non-CA certificates. The signees field is stored as a python Counter. These relationships are used to build trust bundles.

Information in Certipy is generally passed around as records which point to actual files. For most _record methods, there are generally equivalent _file methods that operate on files themselves. The former will only affect records in Certipy's store and the latter will affect both (something happens to the file, the record for it should change, too).

Release

Certipy is released under BSD license. For more details see the LICENSE file.

LLNL-CODE-754897