SOAPbox has a lot of useful features, such as testing REST Web Services like Microsoft's Bing, doing a vulnerability assessment of a Web Service, and driving command-line stress testing of a Web Service.

But did you know that you can use it to generate X.5o9 certificates and their corresponding private keys? For this purpose, it's a lot easier than using the OpenSSL command-line options. With SOAPbox, the whole process is GUI-driven. Here's how you do it:

First, under the "Security" menu item, choose "View Certificates":



Now his "Create" in the bottom-right, and you see this page:

Now you can insert the certificate attributes by pressing on the "Edit" button near the top-right of the "Configure Certificate and Private Key" dialog:



If you want to also create a private key to correspond to your new certificate, press on "Sign Certificate". You can choose to self-sign the certificate, or you can sign it with an existing CA key (which is then listed as the "Issuer" of your new certificate).

Once you've created your certificate (and, if you signed it, your private key) then you can export this as a PKCS#12 key file or a CRT file in order to import it into another application. You can also, of course, use it for requests you're sending from SOAPbox.

Grab your free copy of SOAPbox here...

• Tutorial: OpenSSL Command