Monthly Archives: February 2016

Creating self-signed certificates with makecert

If you are even in a bind and need a quick self-signed SSL cert and have the Windows SDK installed on your machine, there's a chance you may have the makecert utility and can generate a quick self-signed SSL cert.

The command is as follows:

makecert -r -pe -n "CN=SelfSigned SSL" -a sha1 -ss My -len 2048 -sy 24 -b 01/01/2015 -e 01/01/2050

A complete list of each of the switches can be found here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/desktop/aa386968.aspx

Additionally, a nice MSDN article has been posted on this subject as well: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff699202.aspx

MakeCert is available as part of the Windows SDK, which you can download from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?linkid=84091