What is a self-signed SSL certificate?

A self-signed certificate binds a public key to subject information using its own matching private key rather than a public certificate authority. It is useful for local development, isolated test systems, and controlled environments where the certificate can be trusted manually, but browsers will not trust it by default.

This generator uses node-forge locally to create a 2048-bit RSA key, SHA-256-signed X.509 certificate, and Subject Alternative Name for the chosen host. It is not suitable as a public-production certificate, and the downloaded private key must be protected like any other authentication secret.