Signing a CSR with an ECDSA key in Ruby

Alex Peattie

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09 Feb, 2016 (updated 10 Jun 2020)

3 minute read

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domain_key = OpenSSL::PKey::EC.new('secp384r1').generate_key
csr = OpenSSL::X509::Request.new

csr.public_key = domain_key
csr.sign domain_key, OpenSSL::Digest::SHA256.new

Let’s Encrypt just rolled out support for ECDSA certificates in staging - a move that I think will nudge ECDSA signing more into the mainstream. ECDSA offers higher levels of security at much lower key sizes; as Ivan Ristić explains in Bulletproof SSL and TLS:

ECDSA is the algorithm of the future. A 256-bit ECDSA key provides 128 bits of security versus only 112 bits of a 2,048-bit RSA key. At these sizes, in addition to pro- viding more security, ECDSA is also 2x faster. Compared at equivalent security, against a 3,072-bit RSA key, ECDSA is over 6x faster.

All modern browsers prefer cipher suites using ECDSA keys over RSA keys, although some older clients (IE 10 and older, Android < 4.4) don’t support them; and neither do certain cloud-based servers (I tried and failed with AWS and Netlify 😔).

If you are entering the exciting world of ECDSA with Ruby there are a couple of pitfalls to avoid. Let’s look at the code for generating a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) with an RSA key:

domain_key = OpenSSL::PKey::RSA.new(2048)

csr = OpenSSL::X509::Request.new
csr.subject = OpenSSL::X509::Name.new([['CN', 'alexpeattie.com']])
csr.public_key = domain_key.public_key
csr.sign domain_key, OpenSSL::Digest::SHA256.new

Ruby comes with a OpenSSL::PKey::EC class so the optimist in us might guess we could just swap out all instances of OpenSSL::PKey::RSA with OpenSSL::PKey::EC:

ec_domain_key = OpenSSL::PKey::EC.new('secp384r1')

csr = OpenSSL::X509::Request.new
csr.subject = OpenSSL::X509::Name.new([['CN', 'alexpeattie.com']])
csr.public_key = ec_domain_key.public_key
csr.sign ec_domain_key, OpenSSL::Digest::SHA256.new

If only life were that simple - in fact we’ll need to make a few tweaks to get our CSR working. The first problem is that the public_key and private_key aren’t populated when we instantiate the ec_domain_key, we have to populate them with the generate_key method:

ec_domain_key.public_key
#= > nil

ec_domain_key.generate_key; ec_domain_key.public_key
#=> #<OpenSSL::PKey::EC::Point:0x007fdbece64f90 @group=#<OpenSSL::PKey::EC::Group:0x007fdbece64fb8 @key=#<OpenSSL::PKey::EC:0x007fdbece94880 @group=#<OpenSSL::PKey::EC::Group:0x007fdbece64fb8 ...>>>>

The next problem comes when we try and set the public_key of the CSR:

csr.public_key = ec_domain_key.public_key
# TypeError: wrong argument (OpenSSL::PKey::EC::Point)! (Expected kind of OpenSSL::PKey::PKey)

As the error message tells us, ec_domain_key.public_key is returning an OpenSSL::PKey::EC::Point which doesn’t work with our CSR.

ec_domain_key.is_a? OpenSSL::PKey::PKey
#=> true

ec_domain_key.public_key.is_a? OpenSSL::PKey::PKey
#=> false

We could just use our whole ec_domain_key as our csr.public_key - this has no bad consequences as far as I can tell, but this would be a bit confusing: ec_domain_key is really a private key. A better workaround is to create a second instance of OpenSSL::PKey::EC to act as our public key, then copy over the public part of ec_domain_key:

ec_domain_key, ec_public = OpenSSL::PKey::EC.new('secp384r1'), OpenSSL::PKey::EC.new('secp384r1')
ec_domain_key.generate_key

ec_public.public_key = ec_domain_key.public_key
ec_public.private_key
#=> nil

The last issue is that during when we call .sign, Ruby internally calls the .private? method on our signing keys. The problem is that for OpenSSL::PKey::EC the method is named .private_key? (argh!). This is a known issue, but luckily quite easy to monkey-patch with alias_method:

OpenSSL::PKey::EC.send(:alias_method, :private?, :private_key?)

Our final code to generate an Certificate Signing Request with ECDSA keys in Ruby looks like this:

OpenSSL::PKey::EC.send(:alias_method, :private?, :private_key?)

ec_domain_key, ec_public = OpenSSL::PKey::EC.new('secp384r1'), OpenSSL::PKey::EC.new('secp384r1')
ec_domain_key.generate_key
ec_public.public_key = ec_domain_key.public_key

csr = OpenSSL::X509::Request.new
csr.subject = OpenSSL::X509::Name.new([['CN', 'alexpeattie.com']])
csr.public_key = ec_public
csr.sign ec_domain_key, OpenSSL::Digest::SHA256.new