Many time we need security certificate to digitally sign documents, code, some time configure SSL in our client server application and web applications(All TCP based applications). For personal uses or for development and testing purpose we can generate our own security certificates.

But for trusted certificates we need to contact some certificate authorities to get certificate because those authority can issue certificates which are globally trusted and private keys are digitally signed by CA’s private keys which are very secure.

OpenSSL is most common and trusted tool to generate certificates and is available for many platforms. It also provides libs to implement SSL in you our network applications.

On Windows apart from OpenSSL, their are many OpenSSL based tools comes with other applications and frameworks, which can be used to generate security certificates.

List of tools to generate personal certificates

• OpenSSL: This is an open source software library and tool to create and manage security certificates and also used very widely in many application to implement SSL and TLS.  There are variety of application freely available using this library from command line to GUI based, to create and manage digital certificates. Here is links for OpenSSL, Download links for windows Open SSL For windows, SourceForge OpenSSL for Windows
• Makecert: The Certificate Creation tool generates X.509 certificates for testing purposes only. It creates a public and private key pair for digital signatures and stores it in a certificate file. Makecert.exe tool can be launched from Visual Studio command prompt. This tool comes with Visual Studio.
• Java Keytool: It is a key and certificate management utility and you can create new personal certificate. It allows users to administer their own public/private key pairs and associated certificates for use in self-authentication (where the user authenticates himself/herself to other users/services) or data integrity and authentication services, using digital signatures. It also allows users to cache the public keys (in the form of certificates) of their communicating peers. Java KeyTool
• SelfCert.exe: This tool come with Ms Office to create personal certificates to digitally sign documents. You can find this tool with MS Office 2013 at %Program Files%Microsoft Office 15rootoffice15

You can use any of these tools to generate personal certificates for you development, testing and other personal purpose.