Amazon ELB – How to Install a Thawte SSL Certificate

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Here's my situation. We've generated an SSL certificate from Thawte for a site we're hosting on EC2. We have our servers load balanced using Elastic Load Balancer.

Thawte gives us one PKCS signed certificate. When I go to the Amazon console to generate a new load balancer so that I can attach the certificate it requires 4 fields:

Certificate Name
Private Key
Public Key
Certificate Chain

Where I'm getting confused is that we only have the 1 certificate, yet the private & public keys are expected to be different.

What's the process to complete this?

Best Answer

  1. Certificate name is your choice - it is just to identify the certificate later
  2. Private Key is the key (PEM, base-64) you generated when you created your CSR - you will copy and paste the entire file into the field, from -----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY----- to -----END RSA PRIVATE KEY----- (inclusive).

  3. Public Key is the PEM encoded, based 64 verion of what obtained from Thawte (X.509). Copy the contents of the X.509 into a text editor (e.g. vi), save it with a .cer extension. Use OpenSSL to display it in the needed format:

    openssl x509 -inform DER -in yourfilefromthawte.cer

    Copy and paste the output from -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- to -----END CERTIFICATE----- (inclusive) into the field.

  4. Certificate Chain is the Thawte CA bundle that you can download from their site. For Thawte's SSL Web Server and Wildcard certificates (may be different if you have a different certificate type), their CA bundle is available from their site. (Download the 'Bundled CA version', it is already in PEM format, copy and paste the entire file (both certificates) into the field)

Check out this AWS thread for more information (although that is Verizon specific, the basic ideas apply).

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