Self-Signed SSL Certificates for FIX

In this guide, we will cover the step-by-step process of generating secure, self-signed SSL certificates specifically for Financial Information Exchange (FIX) protocols. Whether you're setting up a test environment or need a quick solution for internal communications, this guide provides an easy-to-follow approach using OpenSSL. We'll go through the following steps:

  1. Generating a secure private key.
  2. Creating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR).
  3. Generating the self-signed certificate.
  4. Combining your private and public keys into the PKCS#12 format, a widely accepted format for storing and managing certificates.

Generate private key

openssl genpkey -algorithm RSA -out PROJ-FIX.key -pkeyopt rsa_keygen_bits:2048

Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR)

openssl req -new -key PROJ-FIX.key -out PROJ-FIX.csr -subj "/C=US/ST=NY/L=New York/O=ACME/OU=ACMEFIX/CN=acmefix.acme.com"

Generate a Self-Signed Certificate

openssl x509 -req -days 1095 -in PROJ-FIX.csr -signkey PROJ-FIX.key -out PROJ-FIX.crt

This will generate a self-signed certificate and output it in PEM format.

Combine the private key and the certificate into a PKCS#12 format (equivalent of JKS for Java)

openssl pkcs12 -export -inkey PROJ-FIX.key -in PROJ-FIX.crt -out PROJ-FIX.p12 -name "PROJFIX" -password pass:SECRET

Now you can import the PKCS certificate into the system via CI/CD tool like Octopus Deploy or use it directly on the development workstation by specifying the path to it.