Security+ Question of the day: What are we attempting to accomplish using the syntax that was typed in the figure? (see answer below and video response.)
Answer
What we are looking at is the terminal in Linux (specifically Ubuntu 14.04). The syntax that was typed will start the SSL certificate request process to a certificate authority (CA), for example: VeriSign. OpenSSL is installed by default to this version of Ubuntu, but other versions of Linux might need OpenSSL installed before attempting this task. Client versions of Windows will definitely need OpenSSL installed first.
The certificate signing request (CSR) all starts with the creation of a private 2048-bit RSA key. In this scenario we are hashing the process with SHA256 and are creating two files: the private key (called key.pem) and the certificate request file (called req.pem). These are both sent to the CA.
Video answer:
