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Organizations are reliant on digital communications secured using X.509 certificates for their day-to-
day operations. Certificates are used for user authentication, secure communications using
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), program-to-program and machine-to-machine communications, digital
signature, and code signing. Many unseen internal and external services performing their daily
duties are authenticated and trusted based on a relatively simple process involving the verification
that an issued certificate is still active.
Expired X.509 certificates result in a number of system maladies, ranging from a simple error
message on a screen to an abrupt termination of service. This can lead to abandoned e-commerce
transactions or the loss of trust in a company's Web presence. Many organizations that have an
unplanned certificate expiry typically focus on other systemic causes, such as hardware/software
issues, long before they begin to consider an expired X.509 certificate as the source of troubles.
This typically results in significant delays in identifying and resolving the root cause of a system
outage.
During the past few years, another form of X.509 certificate-related problem has come forward in
security news — that of the compromised public certificate issuing authority. Because of threatened
or actual compromises at DigiNotar, Comodo and others, previously issued certificates from these
public providers have had to be revoked, either individually or, at worst, en masse, with an entire
certificate issuance infrastructure losing complete trustworthiness. This latter case invalidated all
currently issued and active X.509 certificates from that certificate authority, and necessitated a
complete reissuance of X.509 certificates from an alternate issuer. Organizations should be
explicitly aware of the potential for significant impact on their operations should they be associated
with such an incident. Knowing the specific provenance of each and every X.509 certificates in use
within an organization is critical in ensuring the timely reissuance of certificates, thus minimizing
downtime. It is also necessary to have a suitable management interface to remotely installed
certificates, and to trust root certificate lists so they too can be replaced if compromised (see
"Certificate Authority Breaches Impact Web Servers, Highlighting the Need for Better Controls").
Many organizations scramble to remove a trusted root when a compromise takes place.
Organizations need to understand their internal process for removing a trusted certificate or root
from browsers and applications. While browsers are relatively easy to fix by waiting for the browser
patch with the removed/deleted/revoked root, applications typically involve more work and, thus,
more planning.
One of the first steps in identifying compromised certificates is to identify ALL certificates and
evaluate each relying server for certificate validity. However, many organizations do not have a good
understanding of their inventory of digital certificates or where they are. They may rely on
spreadsheet-based manual methods to track certificates, but the spreadsheet method is deficient in
that it does not record or track anything that is not entered into it. The commercial certificate
authorities and public key infrastructure (PKI) software vendors do provide some rudimentary
certificate management. For example, they may notify the original individual corporate purchaser of
an imminent certificate expiry, but not be able to handle cases where that individual has changed
roles or left the organization.
X.509 Certificate Management Functions
Several commercial certificate authorities, PKI and certificate management solution providers offer
Certificate Management System (CMS) software that can be used to discover, identify, track, notify,
and ultimately automatically renew and audit the installation of new X.509 certificates. In general,
the functions of this software are:
Discovery:
• Discovery is a primary function of a CMS. It scans the network, systems and applications;
logs all instances of X.509 certificates; and may include all or some of the following: SSL,
Transport Layer Security, Secure Socket Shell (SSH), Pretty Good Privacy and others.
Filters can be set to limit "noise" in discovery, but overall discovery should be able to
support a deep dive understanding of where cryptographic keys are stored, their strength,
the issuer, validity period and expiry date. There is a potential problem with discovery
"crawlers" that may occasionally cause a target platform to malfunction. Further, some
keys, such as those supporting Microsoft's Encrypting File System, are stored in the
registry, meaning the discovery agent cannot access them unless the local user is logged
on.
Ownership:
• Identify who the certificate owners are for a given certificate and the approval structure for
the issuance and renewal. Billing and chargeback processes can also be associated for a
certificate as part of this activity.
Validate:
• A CMS may eventually have a feature that regularly checks certificates against certificate
revocation lists (CRLs) and Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) responders to
recertify trust both inside and outside the context of a live interaction between servers, or
between a browser and a server. Currently, validation is a function of the client (such as a
browser), but is not typically turned on for performance or other reasons. Ultimately, CRL
and OCSP functionality will become a mature CMS feature.
Renewal/provisioning:
• Some CMSs can support the automatic renewal of a certificate within a prescribed period
prior to expiry. What is important to note is that the renewal process from most certificate
issuers and PKI vendors typically favor their own brands, meaning that certificates slated
for renewal will be renewed using only their own certificate authority. At this time, only
Venafi supports renewal using any certificate authority (internal or external).
Audit:
• When a certificate is renewed, it is critically important to ensure that the new X.509
certificate itself was both installed and rendered active within the target system, otherwise
the previous X.509 certificate can remain active even after a new certificate has been
installed.
• Verify the actual in-use certificates against those charged by a third party or an internal a
provider list.
A limited number of certificates can be managed manually using a spreadsheet or other basic tools,
but many features, such as discovery, will be missing. If this method is chosen, specific individuals
or roles need to be assigned to managed certificates on groups of machines, and scheduling
reminders set for certificate renewal before the installed certificates expire.
In the meantime, please explore more of our solutions