How to Generate and Verify a CSR Using OpenSSL 

Hello everyone!!!!

In my company, we need to generate a new csr to renew our certificate and so I'd like to share some information:

A Certificate Signing Request (CSR) is a cryptographic file created when requesting an SSL/TLS certificate for a website. It contains essential details about the domain and organization, and its purpose is to request a Certificate Authority (CA) to issue a certificate. There are some key elements in a CSR:

1- Common Name: The fully qualified domain name (e.g., www.burcumeken.com) for which the SSL certificate is requested.

2-Organization (O): The legal name of the organization.

3-Organizational Unit (OU): The department within the organization, e.g., "IT Department."

4-Country (C): The country code (ISO format, e.g., US).

5-State/Province (ST): The state or province where the organization is registered.

6-City/Locality (L): The city where the organization is located.

7-Email Address: Sometimes included for CA communication.

You can also leave some fields blank or press Enter to skip optional ones.

Step 1: Verify OpenSSL Version

The version of OpenSSL installed on your system determines the cryptographic algorithms and protocols available for use. Checking your version is especially important when addressing potential issues or ensuring compatibility.

openssl version -a


The -a flag is used to enable Base64 encoding for output or input data in Linux OS in above.

Step 2:

openssl req -new -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout private.key -out request.csr

In this command we are requesting new "csr" 2048 bit key with RSA cryptographic algorithm. You can see the output on below in macOS system:


You can show your private key by writing nano private.key in your terminal:


To check your csr file, you can use ls *.csr command:


After getting all files, you can verify your csr file by using the following command to view the contents of the CSR file before submitting it to a Certificate Authority (CA):


Once you receive your certificate, it's important to confirm that the certificate details align with your private key.

Detecting Trends in Twitter Health News

My teammate and me took Data Mining Course together and we were supposed to create a project which was represented end of the semester. We chose "Detecting Trends in Twitter Health News".

Our motivation was:

Twitter has become a major source for data in recent years and it provides great opportunities for data scientists and analyst to develop models to try and solve whatever problem they have in mind since everything is being shared. One of the important areas is health and twitter has a lot of information from news agencies. By considering health tweets, we can get a lot of insights on the health problems the world faced during the time if the collected data, and we can know what problems were popular or not. For our project, our goal is to find a way to detect trends of health issues. More specifically the questions we are trying to answer are: When does flu become an important issue each year (for the years the data was collected), and can we find another major health issue that has recurring patterns and be able to apply the same model to it? This problem is sure to be done before but not in the same way we are presenting it, we are not sure how it is being done but we can assume that there are some tools that have been developed so that medical professionals always are in the know for trends in health issues.

We use Spark and you can find the project in my GitHub account:

DataMiningProject

For our project, our goal is to find a way to detect trends of health issues. More specifically the questions
we are trying to answer are: When does flu become an important issue each year (for the years the data was collected), and can we find another major health issue that has recurring patterns and be able to apply the same model to it? This problem is sure to be done before but not in the same way we are presenting it, we are not sure how it is being done but we can assume that there are some tools that have been developed so that medical professionals always are in the know for trends in health issues.



Our contributions include building a model that when given a set of tweets and their corresponding time (month and year preferably) and specify a disease, can be able to produce a monthly trend graph for each year of the data collected. This would make it very convenient for anyone who is curious to get helpful information from only a set of tweets. It is hard to validate the system accuracy since there is nothing to compare it against, but one approach might be using our previous knowledge on when flu for example tends to start and end as a validator. Our goal also is to have a model that is not slow and can finish in a reasonable amount of time.


                                                                   Step 2: Reduce to unique dates


                                                                    Step 3: Reduce to unique dates more:


Results:

The figure in below indicates rise of tweets with "flu" at the end of each year and beginning of next year, while flattening in the middle of the year.


Another figure indicates sharp rise in "Ebola" in tweets mid 2014. There was an Ebola epidemic outbreak between 2014-2016 according to CDC[1].


The last figure proves that we can use the model for any keyword and produce nice graphs.


  • Histogram shows the top 25 word with highest word counts.
  • Ebola is the disease with most tweets


Conclusion:

  • Model Can be applied to any field not just health given relative set of tweets.
  • Dynamically detect start and end dates of tweets.
  • Produces clean graphs that can be easily understood.

References:

[1] source: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/history/2014-2016-outbreak/index.html