Get a ECDSA TLS certificate for your onion service

While reading through Tor blog, there was a post back in March 2021 to announce HARICA, a root CA operator, has started selling .onion TLS certificate. The cert is of domain validation (DV) type, significantly easier to purchase and cheaper than Digicert’s extended validation (EV) cert, which was previously the only CA that supports .onion.

The post links to an excellent tutorial. Different from the tutorial, I prefer to use ECDSA cert than RSA, just like Cloudflare’s cert. It includes nginx config, whereas I’m using Caddy web server.

1. Create a new Cert Manager account in HARICA.
2. From the Server Certificate on the left sidebar, create a new request for your onion address.
3. HARICA can generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) on your behalf, but I prefer to use an OpenSSL-generated CSR, so I generated and uploaded one.
4. To generate a CSR using OpenSSL:

# Generate an elliptic-curve private key
$ openssl ecparam -name prime256v1 -genkey -noout -out myonion.key
# prime256v1 is also used by Cloudflare

# Generate a CSR
$ openssl req -new -key myonion.key -out myonion.csr
# Leave everything blank by entering a dot (.), except for Common Name (CN)
# Enter your onion address in CN fieldCopy

5. DV cert only requires a valid CN field, it’s optional to enter personal details in the CSR.
6. Back in Cert Manager, choose “upload a text file to a location on your web server” as the validation option. This option enables you to get wildcard (*.onion.com) cert, necessary if you have subdomain(s) under your onion service.
7. Instead of uploading a file to web server, I use respond instead.

http://xw226dvxac7jzcpsf4xb64r4epr6o5hgn46dxlqk7gnjptakik6xnzqd.onion:8080 {
  bind ::1

  # Harica CA domain validation
  @harica path /.well-known/pki-validation/xxx
  respond @harica "yyy"
}Copy

8. Restart Caddy and check the path has correct response. `curl http://localhost:8080/.well-known/pki-validation/xxx -H “Host: your-onion.onion”

9. After HARICA verified my onion, I received an email notification that it’s ready for purchase and download.

10. Download the PEM bundle.

    • HARICA is transitioning to new root certs. For compatibility with older browsers that have not include the latest root certs yet, the PEM bundle needs to include a cross-cert.
    • To download the cross-cert, heads to HARICA repo, select HARICA TLS RSA Root CA 2021 Cross Certificate from HARICA ECC Root CA 2015, 2021 and download PEM.
    • Append the cross-cert to the PEM bundle, $ cat pem-bundle.pem cross-cert.pem > fixed-pem-bundle.pem
    • More details

11. Upload “.pem” and “.key” to the server. chown it to the Caddy system user and chmod 600.

12. Install the cert in Caddy. Site address has to be separated to HTTP and HTTPS blocks due to the use of custom port. When custom port is not used, Caddy listens on port 80 and 443 by default.

# HTTP
http://xw226dvxac7jzcpsf4xb64r4epr6o5hgn46dxlqk7gnjptakik6xnzqd.onion:8080 {
  bind ::1

  # Redirect to HTTPS
  redir https://xw226dvxac7jzcpsf4xb64r4epr6o5hgn46dxlqk7gnjptakik6xnzqd.onion{uri} permanent

  # HSTS (optional)
  header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload"
}

# HTTPS
xw226dvxac7jzcpsf4xb64r4epr6o5hgn46dxlqk7gnjptakik6xnzqd.onion:8079 {
  bind ::1

  tls /var/lib/caddy/myonion.pem /var/lib/caddy/myonion.key

  header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload"

  @harica path /.well-known/pki-validation/xxx
  respond @harica "yyy"
}Copy

13. Finally, update the Tor config. I configured it via NixOS global config.

configuration.nix
services.tor = {
  enable = true;
  relay.onionServices = {
    myonion = {
      version = 3;
      map = [{
        port = 80;
        target = {
          addr = "[::1]";
          port = 8080;
        };
      } {
        port = 443;
        target = {
          addr = "[::1]";
          port = 8079;
        };
      }];
    };
  };
};Copy