TLS: "Certificate provided as Authority does not appear to be a valid Certificate Authority"

Terraform Providers
1

I’m using hashicorp/tls, and am generating a client certificate that’s signed by a self-signed root certificate, and I’m getting this warning:

Warning: Potentially Invalid Certificate Authority
Certificate provided as Authority does not appear to be a valid Certificate Authority. The resulting certificate might fail certificate validation.

Does this just mean that the client certificate is not trusted (because it’s obviously signed by a self-signed certificate), or is it completely invalid i.e. it wouldn’t work even if I force trusted it?

2

The warning you’re encountering, “Certificate provided as Authority does not appear to be a valid Certificate Authority,” is quite common when dealing with self-signed certificates in infrastructure provisioning, especially with HashiCorp’s Terraform and TLS provider.

To clarify, this warning does not necessarily mean that your client certificate is invalid in the technical sense.

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