How to Manage X.509 Digital Certificates

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X.509 digital certificates are used to manage identity & security in internet communications & computer networking. Learn all about managing X.509 certificates.

April 4, 20229 min read

X.509 certificate management is the process of issuing, installing, renewing, and revoking digital certificates. While there is no stronger, easier-to-use authentication and encryption solution than the digital identity provided by X.509 certificates, the challenge for busy IT teams is that manually deploying and managing them is time-consuming, and can result in unnecessary risk. To address these issues, organizations can manage and automate the entire certificate lifecycle using a digital certificate management platform.

With a management platform, you can:

Automate certificate issuance, installation, renewal, and revocation
Discover and search your inventory
View and monitor certificate details and properties
Apply certificate governance and policies
Maintain a certificate revocation list (CRL)

How Are X.509 Certificates Used?

The X.509 standard defines the format of public key infrastructure (PKI) certificates. Public key certificates are used to verify the digital identity of any user, machine, or process. As the foundation for all digital identities, X.509 certificates are everywhere and are essential to every connected process.

There are many applications for these, including:

Web server certificates: SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure communications between a web server and a web browser. SSL certificates (security sockets layer) / TLS certificates (transport layer security) are also used to authenticate the identity of the web server.
Document signing: Document signing is a way to ensure that a document is authentic and has not been tampered with. This method can be used to sign any type of document, including contracts, legal documents, and email messages.
Code signing: Code signing is a way to ensure that a piece of software has not been tampered with and that it comes from a trusted source. Code signing can also be used to verify the identity of the software publisher.
Email security: Email certificates are used to encrypt email messages and to authenticate the identity of the sender. They can also be used to sign email messages, which allows the recipient to verify the message’s authenticity.
SSH keys: SSH keys are used to authenticate the identity of a user or a computer when connecting to a remote server and can also encrypt communications between a user and a remote server.

How Are They Issued?

There are many applications for X.509 certificates, including:

Web server certificates: SSL/TLS certificates are used to secure communications between a web server and a web browser. SSL certificates (security sockets layer) / TLS (transport layer security) certificates are also used to authenticate the identity of the web server.
Document signing: Document signing is a way to ensure that a document is authentic and has not been tampered with. Document signing can be used to sign any type of document, including contracts, legal documents, and email messages.
Code signing: Code signing is a way to ensure that a piece of software has not been tampered with and that it comes from a trusted source. Code signing can also be used to verify the identity of the software publisher.
Email security: Email certificates are used to encrypt email messages and to authenticate the identity of the sender. Email certificates can also be used to sign email messages, which allows the recipient to verify the message’s authenticity.
SSH keys: SSH keys are used to authenticate the identity of a user or a computer when connecting to a remote server. SSH keys can also be used to encrypt communications between a user and a remote server.

How to Issue an X.509 Certificate?

X.509 certificates are trusted to authenticate and encrypt digital identities based on their strong cryptographic structure and how they are issued. An X.509 certificate is a digital certificate based on the universally accepted International Telecommunications Union (ITU) X.509 standard. This standard has also been adapted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) public-key infrastructure working group in the definition of its own Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Profile standard (RFC 5280).

This standard defines the use of a key pair of related cryptographic keys — a public key and a private key. The public key is comprised of a long string of numbers and can be used to encrypt a message. Only the intended recipient can decipher and read this encrypted message by using the associated private key, which is also made of a long string of numbers. This private key is secret and is known only to the recipient. As the public key is published for all the world to see, public keys are created using a complex cryptographic algorithm, such as RSA, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), and digital signature algorithm (DSA), to pair them with an associated private key by generating numeric combinations of varying lengths so that they cannot be hacked through a brute force attack.

Moreover, the key usage architecture lets certificates verify that:

A public key belongs to the hostname/domain, organization, or individual contained within the certificate.
It has been signed by a publicly trusted issuer Certificate Authority (CA), like Sectigo, or self-signed.

A trusted Certificate Authority or agent is used to issue certificates and publish the public keys. This CA is needed for senders to know they're using the correct public key associated with the recipient's private key, and also to provide a means for recipients to verify the CA's digital signature on the certificate. The issuance process starts with a request for a private key from the CA using a certificate signing request (CSR).

The issuing CA is responsible for validating that only authorized entities receive certificates, based on requirements set forth by the CA/Browser Forum. When one is signed and issued by a trusted CA, the user can be confident that the owner or hostname/domain has been validated. On the other hand, self-signed certificates can be trusted to a lesser extent as the owner doesn't go through any additional validation before issuance.

Enterprises can also act as their own private CA, in which case they would check and vouch for the identity of senders whose public keys they publish, ensure those public keys are associated with the private keys of senders and safeguard the private keys. Generally, it is much more common to use a commercial CA because they have the requisite security practices, policies, and procedures in place to ensure safety. In either case, a root CA or root certificate is needed, which is a certificate that is used to sign all of the other CA certificates.

A Guide to X.509 Certificate Management

The use of digital certificates is growing rapidly as organizations adopt more secure and efficient ways to conduct business online. An effective x.509 certificate management tool is needed to avoid outages and disruptions to business operations and protect against increasingly sophisticated threats and attacks by cybercriminals.

A digital certificate contains information about the holder, such as the distinguished name of the organization, the organization's address, and the identity of the certificate authority.

There are five fundamental elements of managing x.509 certificates.

Discovery: Organizations must find and inventory which certificates they have installed, identify where they are located, and catalog their attributes. An automated, continuous discovery process is needed to search and find all certificates across the enterprise, as well as to proactively ensure that each one follows policies.
Issuance and Installation: Organizations request certificates from the CA and then must correctly configure and install them. The issuance process requires 8-10 individual steps to properly submit a certificate signing request (CSR), install in the correct location, and test the final configuration. The issuance and installation process can take several hours to complete and is fraught with the potential for error at each step if done manually.
Renewal: All certificates have an expiration date, and it is important to renew them before they expire. Once one expires, it is no longer valid. Organizations that use spreadsheets to manually track expirations or that rely on email alerts to notify them of impending expiration put their systems at risk of outage or breaches.
Revocation: Organizations need to be able to quickly and easily revoke and replace a certificate on demand rather than waiting until the validity period ends to make the upgrade. This is essential for enforcing the highest degree of cryptographic security and for maintaining customer trust. Additionally, organizations must maintain a certificate revocation list (CRL) that provides visibility into any that are no longer valid.
Governance: Organizations need to establish policies and processes for their certificates and cryptographic environment, including controls to ensure that only authorized personnel have access. Additionally, organizations should audit their certificate inventory on a regular basis to ensure that all are valid and that no unauthorized ones have been issued.

Why Automation is Key

Whether an enterprise deploys a single SSL for a web server or manages millions of certificates across all its user, device, and application identities, the end-to-end process of certificate issuance, configuration, and deployment can take several hours. Manually managing them also puts enterprises at significant risk of neglected certificates expiring unexpectedly and of exposure to gaps in ownership. If the ball gets unintentionally dropped that lapse can result in sudden outages, failure of critical business systems, and damaging security breaches.

Here are some of the challenges organizations face when managing certificates:

IT Team Struggle to Avoid Unplanned Outages

Customers and internal users rely on a critical business system protected by certificates to be always available. But in recent years, expired certificates have resulted in many high-profile website and service outages. The result has been billions of dollars in lost revenue, contract penalties, lawsuits, and the incalculable cost of tarnished brand reputations and lost customer goodwill.

Administration Costs Add Up Quickly

Though certificate management may sometimes be regarded as a simple, day-to-day task for an IT or web administrator, ensuring they are valid one at a time is costly. Using manual processes to discover, install, monitor, and renew all the PKI certificates in an organization is labor-intensive and technically demanding.

Consider, for example, that even a minimal manual SSL installation with a single web server and domain instance involves multiple steps, and can easily add up to over $50 per web server. Now multiply that effort across the thousands or millions of PKI certificates in an organization, and it becomes readily apparent that the costs of manual management add up quickly.

Organizations Must Be in Compliance with Regulations — Or Face Substantial Penalties

Insufficient security can also put enterprises in jeopardy of failing to comply with regulatory mandates. Privacy regulations such as HIPAA/HITECH, GDPR, and the U.S. federal government’s DFARS define instances and use cases that require encryption to mitigate or minimize the consequences of a breach. Failure to meet compliance requirements with your digital certificates can result in substantial fines. For example, the EU recently charged GDPR-related fines to Google for €50 million, Marriott for £99 million, and British Airways for £183 million.

How Do You Manage Certificates?

These certificate management challenges combine to present a daunting task for IT security teams. Compounding those issues is the explosive growth and new varieties of digital identities that need X.509 certificates. New use cases now include hybrid and multi-cloud environments, DevOps containers, IoT devices, and other burgeoning enterprise applications.

The best way for security teams to effectively and efficiently manage every single certificate in their environment is to automate the end-to-end certificate lifecycle. Certificate Lifecycle Management (CLM) is a comprehensive solution that automates the entire lifecycle, from provisioning and deployment to revocation.

CLM ensures that all certificates are properly installed, monitored, and renewed, providing organizations with the scalability, visibility, and control they need to keep their digital certificates valid and their environments safe. Sectigo Certificate Manager provides a single administration portal to secure and manage growing numbers of digital certificates with integrations into leading technology providers that work efficiently in any IT environment.