Certificate Lifecycle Management

"On average, companies spend 225 hours manually managing 50 certificates a year [2]. About 74% of enterprises have seen system outages due to unplanned certificate expiration [3], and over 50% have a lost or rogue digital certificate"

Ken Linscott, Circle ID - March 2020

Certificates typically have a 4-phase lifecycle - Discovery, Enrollment, Provisioning, and End-of-life. To make your PKI mature and reliable, you must have more control over all the phases. The key aspects of these 4 phases are:

Discovery

Enrollment

Provisioning

End of life

Why you need a certificate management system

A certificate management system becomes necessary when the organization faces any of the following scenarios:

Manual labor reaches a threshold, for example:

Your certificate lifecycle processes are missing. It means:

Reporting and monitoring are required for the followings:

Challenges in a certificate management system

As organizations work towards enhancing the security of their data, they are often confronted with challenges around the management of certificates. Following are the challenges which every organization faces in creating and maintaining the certificate lifecycle management.

Core Work

Establishing requirement
Architecture design
Importing existing certificates
Network discovery scan
Configuring policies and reports
Onboarding applications
Documentation on operations
Training

Additional Work

Challenges

Key challenges of an organization

While dealing with certificate management, most organizations face challenges like manual-labour crossing the threshold, missing lifecycle processes, a need for monitoring/ reporting, automation of processes, or lack of operational documentation and training.

Solving your problems and challenges

Encryption Consulting offers a broad range of services in the Certificate Management space, from strategy to implementation and managed services. Encryption consulting can help solving the problems and challenges in certificate lifecycle management, through the followings:

Establishing requirement, and designing the architecture
Performing network discovery scan
Importing existing certificates
Configuring policies and reports
Onboarding a set of pilot applications
Preparing documentation for operations and training
Developing a plan for addressing gaps
Developing a guide for process/ operations and certified training

Professional Services Offered

Implementing Certificate life cycle solution for certificate management
Implementing Certificate life cycle solution for SSH key management
Implementing automation for certificate lifecycle on various platforms (e.g. F5, tomcat, IIS)
Integrating PKI with other security services (typically to enable cert-based authentication on VPN, Wi-Fi, NAC)

Necessity for the Certificate Lifecycle Management

All digital certificates have a limited lifespan and are no longer recognized as valid upon expiration. Certificates needs to be replaced at the end of their life to avoid service disruption and decreased security. If a certificate fails, the vulnerability can be exploited by malicious man-in-the-middle attacks, allowing hackers to gain access to sensitive information. This will not only influence sales, day-to-day business, and brand reputation – but it will also result in a lack of confidence and trust from your customers. However, there are other scenarios where the certificate needs to be replaced/renewed before the expiration date, for example: SHA-1 end of life migration, change in company policy, etc.).

The certificates need to be constantly monitored to ensure that they are effective. The administrators should have controls over approval process of creating/requesting any certificate, just to ensure that no unwanted certificates are added to the system.

To avoid any security and management gaps such as certificates that get lost in the system, get expired, and cause revenue loss and reputation, organizations must design and implement proper certificate Lifecycle Management approaches/strategies.