SSL ASN1 Encoding routines and x509 certificate routine errors - ssl

Question

I'm completely new to anything Secure Socket Layer related up until yesterday evening and today. I need to get a self-signed certificate to proceed with an app registration process so that I can implement OAuth in an app I'm writint. I went through a nice tutorial about how to generate certificates here. I'm an ubuntu user, if you didn't click the link to figure that out. I've been trying to generate a self-signed 1024 bit RSA key encoded x.509 certificate in PEM format. After setting up the configuration and doing everything as is on the tutorial (of course with the exception of specifying the environment-related data to my own environment). The commands to generate a new certificate and key after going through the configuration are:
forces SSL to look for configuration file in alternate location (the server configuration file):
export OPENSSL_CONF=~/myCA/exampleserver.cnf
Generate the certificate and key:
openssl req -newkey rsa:1024 -keyout tempkey.pem -keyform PEM -out tempreq.pem -outform PEM
Following those two commands the following is displayed:
Generating a 1024 bit RSA private key
...++++++
...............++++++
writing new private key to 'tempkey.pem'
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Verifying - Enter PEM pass phrase:
-----
I enter my pass phrase and the error I continually get is:
problems making Certificate Request
3074111688:error:0D06407A:asn1 encoding routines:a2d_ASN1_OBJECT:first num too large:a_object.c:109:
3074111688:error:0B083077:x509 certificate routines:X509_NAME_ENTRY_create_by_txt:invalid field name:x509name.c:285:name=organizationUnitName

Answer 1

I ran into a similar problem while following the same tutorial that you mentioned. In my case, the error was:
problems making Certificate Request
140098671105696:error:0D07A097:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_mbstring_ncopy:string too long:a_mbstr.c:154:maxsize=2
So I figured out that I've written some string which should have been 2 characters long (maxsize=2), but happened way longer. I returned back to my config file and quickly found that I've wrote the long name of the country, instead of the 2-character code. This solved my problem.

Answer 2

not really familiar with the process but, it appears "invalid field name:x509name.c:285:name=organizationUnitName" means your Organization Unit Name is invalid.
According to digicert.com: The Organizational Unit is whichever branch of your company is ordering the certificate such as accounting, marketing, etc.

Answer 3

it depends on what is in your conf file, the openssl ca tool looks for sections in the file, those sections look for other sections, some of the section names are mandatory and some of the name/value pairs in sections are mandatory.. it's quite a big configuration space offered by this file
The error you mention comes up when openssl doesnt recognise a name inside a section in different scenarios, e.g. i've seen it when I was adding a custom oid for an end-entity cert, and also when customising contents of a ca cert.
if you post your configuration file and what you expect in the resulting ceritifcate then we can help. Also can you say what you intend to use the certificate for (e.g. secure a client session on a production webservice or something else)

Answer 4

I had the same problem, had C=USA instead of C=US

Answer 5

I had a similar issue. I followed the advice from GitHub using the countryName_default parameter. It seems like this parameter does not exist on my openssh.exe, contrary to the advice on GitHub.
Once I removed any xxx_default parameters from the [ req_distinguished_name ] section of the SSL xxx.conf file, the creation of the certificate succeeded.
This is working on Windows 10.