Creating self-signed certificates with open ssl on windows

Question

I follow these guidelines for creating self-signed certificates with OpenSSL.

I am on Windows 10. My working directory is as follows:

PS E:\Certificats\predix\root\ca> ls Directory: E:\Certificats\predix\root\ca Mode LastWriteTime Length Name ---- ------------- ------ ---- d----- 9/1/2016 11:57 AM certs d----- 9/1/2016 11:55 AM crl d----- 9/1/2016 12:00 PM intermediate d----- 9/1/2016 11:55 AM newcerts d----- 9/1/2016 11:56 AM private -a---- 9/1/2016 11:55 AM 2 index.txt -a---- 9/1/2016 11:56 AM 4306 openssl.cnf -a---- 9/1/2016 11:55 AM 14 serial 

After a few steps in the manual, when I type

 openssl ca -config openssl.cnf -extensions v3_intermediate_ca -days 3650 -notext -md s 

I get the following error

 Using configuration from openssl.cnf Enter pass phrase for ./private/ca.key.pem: unable to load number from ./serial error while loading serial number 12944:error:0D066096:asn1 encoding routines:a2i_ASN1_INTEGER:short line:.\crypto\asn1\f_int.c:212: PS E:\Certificats\predix\root\ca> openssl ca -config openssl.cnf -extensions v3_intermediate_ca -days 3650 -notext -md sha256 -in intermediate/csr/intermediate.csr.pem -out intermediate/certs/intermediate.cert.pem Using configuration from openssl.cnf 

reporting that he has a problem reading the serial file.

Serial Number Content

 1000 

Does anyone have a fix? The file exists and its path in the conf file is correct ...

Answer 1

Solved the problem myself: I created a serial file using

 echo 00 > serial 

which created the Unicode file while openssl was expecting the ANSI file.