Certificate management refers to the management of digital certificates throughout their entire life cycle, from when they are issued and discovered to when they are renewed and revoked.
Digital certificates, also known as SSL/TLS certificates, act like online passports, helping serve as identification cards for digital entities and ensuring digital interactions are secure. Certificates are crucial component of the public key infrastructure (PKI).
With the number of devices across the corporate network increasing every day, the number of certificates issued has accelerated as well. IT administrators often struggle with tracking certificate issuance and validity given the large number of certificates in an organization's network, and this can result in orphaned certificates and certificate expiries.
Expired SSL/TLS certificates can disrupt websites, services, and applications by breaking secure communication channels, leading to downtime and security risks. With effective certificate management tools and processes in place, organizations can address these challenges through centralized inventory, automatic discovery, proactive monitoring, timely alerts, and automated renewals, to stay on top of certificate expiries and misconfigurations.
The recent talk of 90-and 45-day certificate validity mandates and proposals by giants like Google and Apple makes certificate management indispensable to operational continuity as well as security.
Before going into the details of certificate management, let's first explore some basics.
Certificate authorities, or CAs, are trusted entities that issue digital certificates by validating the identities of the applying organizations or individuals, such as websites or email addresses. CAs are essential cogs for building trust in digital communications, as they verify and guarantee the validity and security of the certificates they issue.
SSL/TLS certificates serve as digital identity cards or credentials that help authenticate a website or server's identity and enable secure, encrypted communication between the website's server and a browser. Certificates ensure that data transmitted in a digital interaction is secure and private.
A certificate signing request (CSR) is a formal request that is submitted by an organization to a CA when they want a new SSL/TLS certificate. A CSR initiated by an organization contains a variety of information, including the server's public key and identifying information about the organization, including its common name of the website or server.
Certificate discovery is the process of discovering all SSL and TLS certificates available in your organizational network. It helps inventory and provide much-needed visibility into the thousands of certificates present in an organization's network, where they are stored, expiry dates, ownership, and so on, and makes it easy to manage all of them from a central console.
Certificate renewal is the process of replacing an existing certificate with a new one either when the old certificate is about to expire or has been compromised. Timely certificate renewal ensures continued validity and security.
Certificate management or certificate life cycle management refers to the process of managing digital certificates end-to-end across their life cycles.
Now that we have a fair idea about the different components of certificate management, let's take a look at certificate life cycle management as a step-by-step process.
Certificate management begins with certificate discovery. Organizations often have numerous certificates distributed across their IT. Therefore, it is vital to discover where they are stored in the organization's environment and have visibility over all of them from the central certificate management console. An effective certificate management tool helps organizations scan the enterprise network, discover all digital certificates in their network, and maintain visibility over them.
For a new certificate to be issued, an organization or individual should first raise a CSR containing the public key and identifying information about the applying entity.
Once the CSR is raised, the request is taken up by a CA, that goes through checks and balances to verify the information in the CSR. The CA validates the information in the CSR through either domain validation, organization validation, or extended validation processes, depending on the certificate type.
If the CSR passes the validation process of the CA and the information is verified, the CA issues a digital certificate, signed with its private key, binding the public key of the organization to the information provided in the CSR.
The issued certificate is then installed and securely deployed to the target server, device, or application.
Once the certificates are discovered and deployed, organizations can continuously monitor all of their digital certificates. This involves constantly tracking the expiry dates (certificates usually have finite validity periods) of all their certificates, scanning for vulnerabilities, and sending out alerts to administrators when a certificate is approaching expiry or if it is found vulnerable.
To avoid manual errors and ensure timely renewals, organizations setup automated renewal processes for certificates approaching expiry. Effective certificate management solutions generate new CSRs, submit them to the CA, and deploy the renewed certificates without human intervention.
If a certificate is compromised, no longer needed, associated with a decommissioned system, or otherwise invalid, it must be revoked. In such cases, the administrator can remove the certificate if it's in the organization's environment, or if identified by the CA, the CA adds the certificate to its certificate revocation list or uses the online certificate status protocol to mark it as invalid.
As with implementing any IT vertical, certificate management comes with challenges that must be addressed. Let's explore some of them.
When organizations need to manage hundreds or thousands of certificates, manual tracking of expiry dates is next to impossible. An overlooked or missed expiration can lead to service outages, security issues, and loss of customer and brand trust. Further, manual deployment and configuration can be tricky to handle for a large volume of certificates and might result in errors. These errors could cause security gaps and disrupt services.
Additionally, conducting manual audits of thousands of certificates across multiple systems is time-consuming and causes significant operational overheads for administrators. Without automated certificate management, IT teams might struggle to maintain an accurate record of all certificates, making it difficult to audit and increasing the risk of non-compliance and security vulnerabilities.
The growing shift towards shorter certificate lifespans, with the 90-and 45-day validities for SSL/TLS certificates around the corner, will without a doubt increase the administrative burden on IT teams. Administrators will have to keep track of expiry dates and renew certificates at a much higher frequency than before, opening the door to manual errors and slip ups.
An organization with 1,000 certificates that previously required renewal every two years now faces over 4,000 renewal events annually with 90-day certificates, requiring precise alerting and renewal mechanisms to be in place. Organizations need to make sure the certificate renewal processes is synchronized across diverse teams, applications, and environments, and the renewal process is automated across the board.
Many organizations use certificates issued by multiple CAs to meet diverse needs, such as cost optimization, geographic requirements, or specific use cases. Additionally, different CAs might enforce varying policies for certificate issuance, validation, and revocation. This inconsistency can lead to confusion and errors, especially when managing a large inventory of certificates.
In the absence of a unified certificate management solution, organizations may use different tools or platforms to manage certificates from different CAs. This makes it difficult to maintain complete visibility and control over thousands of certificates and increases the risk of expired or rogue certificates.
Certificate life cycle management plays a vital role in complying with regulations such as the GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS, among others. When managing certificates across multiple CAs and systems, ensuring compliance with these standards can be particularly challenging.
For example, the GDPR mandates the use of appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect personal data, including encryption. SSL/TLS certificates encrypt data transmitted between a website and a user's browser, preventing interception, ensuring confidentiality, and maintaining integrity during transit. Therefore, organizations must ensure that all certificates used to encrypt data are valid, properly configured, and securely managed. Non-compliance can result in fines of up to 4% of global annual revenue or €20 million (almost $22 million), whichever is higher.
As seen in the above sections, certificate management, although an essential component of an organization's security stack, comes with its own challenges. While organizations may make do with in-house tools to manage certificates, achieving effective certificate management and implementing best practices requires a comprehensive certificate management software.
What are some best practices that organizations can employ such that they implement certificate management in an effective manner, reduce overheads, and minimize risks?
By consolidating all certificates into a single central console, organizations can ensure that they have complete visibility over their digital certificates, where they are located, expiry dates, configurations, and more. This makes it easy for administrators to manage, keep track of certificates, and reduce overheads.
Further, the centralized approach also eliminates the inefficiencies of managing certificates in silos, which often leads to oversights, misconfigurations, and security gaps. A unified certificate management platform also ensures that administrators have all-certificate related data available in one-place, simplifying audits and reporting.
When organizations manage a large amount of certificates in their inventory, it can be difficult to track certificate validity, expiry dates, and vulnerabilities. Therefore, implementing proactive monitoring mechanisms through certificate expiry notifications, automated health checks, periodic vulnerability scans, and customizable alert mechanisms is crucial to achieving effective certificate management.
To avoid manual errors and oversight, administrators could leverage automated certificate lifecycle management workflows for certificate renewals, revocation, and real-time alerts, independent of the type of certificate and agnostic of the issuing CA. This simplifies certificate management for administrators and brings most operations to just a few clicks with the right certificate management solution.
Maintaining comprehensive audit trails of certificate operations helps organizations track certificate management activities across their IT. This helps administrators pull up audit logs and submit reports for forensic or compliance purposes easily and efficiently.
The ideal certificate management solution should provide organizations with the ability to manage all digital certificates across their entire certificate management life cycle from a single, central console and reduce administrative overheads.
ManageEngine Key Manager Plus not only helps organizations discover and manage all of their SSL/TLS certificates in one place, but helps them manage the entire life cycle of their digital certificates. Irrespective of the issuing CA, Key Manager Plus helps organizations manage certificate life cycles starting from raising a CSR to automated renewals with one touch workflows, providing real-time expiry alerts, periodic vulnerability scans, and more from a single platform.
Irrespective of the issuing CA, Key Manager Plus helps organizations manage certificate life cycles starting from raising a CSR to automated renewals with one touch workflows, providing real-time expiry alerts, periodic vulnerability scans, and more from a single platform