Certificate Management

Certificate Repository Discovery & Tracking Discovery Agents Monitoring Automated Renewal Revocation Self-Service

Challenges

Digital keys and certificates play a pivotal role in today's interconnected world, serving as the foundation for secure communication and data protection. Their widespread adoption across industries has enabled seamless encryption, authentication, and authorization processes. However, the management and protection of these critical assets present significant challenges that organizations must address:

  • Lack of accurate inventory: Many organizations struggle to maintain an up-to-date inventory of the certificates and keys in use. Some still rely on manual tracking methods and spreadsheet-based management, which makes it difficult to effectively monitor these assets.
  • Unprotected keys and certificates: Many organizations store keys and certificates in unsecured locations or let them share without proper access controls, leaving these critical assets largely unprotected. This exposes organizations to risks such as unauthorized access, tampering, and theft, compromising the confidentiality and integrity of their systems and data.
  • Certificate expiration management: With organizations manually tracking numerous certificates, keeping tabs on their expiration dates is prone to errors and oversights, which can result in potential service disruptions.
  • Revocation challenges: In scenarios where a digital certificate is compromised or no longer trustworthy, revocation becomes essential. However, managing the revocation process at scale can be daunting. Organizations need streamlined procedures and systems in place to promptly identify and revoke compromised certificates to maintain a secure environment.

CommScope Certificate Management System provides a cloud-based platform that offers you the convenience of uploading previously generated certificates without exposing the private keys. Additionally, we offer a comprehensive suite of tools, APIs, and agent applications designed to assist you in retrieving certificates from various systems and devices. With these tools, you can easily identify and catalog certificates, monitor their validity status, proactively renew, or replace certificates before expiration, and generate informative reports for authorized personnel. By centralizing these management processes, organizations can achieve real-time visibility, automate certificate lifecycle management, and ensure timely revocation when necessary. These measures effectively mitigate risks, improve operational efficiency, and safeguard the integrity of your systems and data.

Certificate Repository

Certificate Repository serves as a centralized resource for storing and managing certificate data, enabling efficient analysis and validation processes.

Once the certificates are obtained, a validation process is conducted to ensure their authenticity and integrity. This involves verifying the certificates against trusted authorities and validating the trust chains, ensuring that each certificate in the chain is valid and can be traced back to a trusted root.

For the completeness of evaluation, both valid and invalid certificates will be saved in the Repository, allowing for comprehensive analysis and identification of potential vulnerabilities or anomalies in the certificate ecosystem. 

Certificate Asset Discovery & Tracking

  • Centralized certificate discovery via open and application-specific interfaces
  • Agent-based certificate information gathering from deployment environment
  • Certificate discovery from certificate transparency (CT) logs
  • Fine-grained control over the scope of certificate discovery
  • Detailed event logs linking each issued certificate to recipient, owner, and approval history
  • Integration with third-party device management solutions

Certificate Discovery Agents

To accurately retrieve provisioned certificates from targeted devices, we will provide specialized Certificate Discovery Agents. They are designed for deployment on a wide range of systems and devices, including those running commonly used operating systems like Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, and vendor-specific platforms. These agents will directly retrieve the actual certificates from the devices and transmit them to the certificate repository. In addition, these agents can be used to support certificate renewal if needed, enabling efficient management of certificates nearing expiration and reducing the risk of service disruptions.

Monitoring

  • Searchable and sortable user interface for certificate inventory browsing
  • Intuitive dashboard providing easy-to-grasp summary statistics on certificates
  • Automated alerts of
    • upcoming certificate expirations
    • identity credentials inventory level reaching predefined threshold
    • upcoming expiration of domain control validation
    • certificate revocations

Automated Renewal

Automated certificate renewal/replacement via standard and proprietary programmatic interfaces.

Please read PKIWorks® Essentials.

Renewal
CRL

Revocation Support

  • Certificate revocation information published via OCSP and CRLs
  • Notification of certificate revocations (whether initiated by subscriber or other parties)

Self-Service Portal

  • User-friendly web interface
  • Order placement and review of order status
  • Request submission for certificate management and key management actions
  • High-level and detailed reports on inventory level, consumption activities, and provisioning events (based on pre-configured and custom templates)
  • At-a-glance graphic visualization of analytics