Learning by Coding: Certificate Signing Requests

Generating certificate signing requests in C#, and what I learned along the way.

One of the best ways to learn about something is to write a program to do it. Often, the process of coding teaches you not just the how, but also the why. In this post, I document my learnings from writing a program to generate Certificate Signing Requests (CSRs).

Background

Over the years, I must have created at least a hundred or more CSRs using OpenSSL. The best thing about OpenSSL? You don’t need really…