3.5.1 Introduction

January 10th, 2026

Utilizing openssl, AC X509 Certificate Authority provides administrators with the power to create multiple root and intermediate level certificate authorities with features suitable for enterprise level management of user and system certificates. It should run on any system with openssl and BASH version 3.0 or higher.

AC X509 Authority is designed to be enterprise grade and work as the backbone of an organization's certificate management infrastructure. It will not necessarily meet every esoteric requirement but if the certificate generation controls meet your needs, then this is the tool for managing thousands of certificates for your systems and end users.
Core Features

• Text wizard driven setup of both root and intermediate certificate authorities.
• CRL management and publishing.
• DN field locking.
• Separate CA workflows for server and end user certificates.
• Export certificates as PEM encoded files or PKCS#12 keystores.
• Certificate listing and querying
• Self-contained directory structure for easy backup and recovery of all CAs and managed certificates.
• Single command line for generating new certificates.

As a no frills certificate authority, AC X509 Authority has been used effectively in the field to manage thousands of certificates for various organizations' systems and end users. Given a few simple responses to the wizard prompts, an administrator can set up a new CA in a couple minutes and start managing end entity certificates effectively.

Administrators should take care to manage their own backups of the AC X509 Authority directory tree. This is highly portable (merely take a copy to backup or restore) but failure to take measures for resiliency could be catastrophic.