5 Reasons to Create a Certificate Lifecycle Management Policy for the New Year
Are you in the market for a good New Year’s resolution? You won’t find a more rewarding one (at least for your company) than to create and implement a certificate lifecycle management (CLM) policy. Among the key components of a CLM are inventory and tracking, renewal and reissue, revocation, auditing and monitoring, and incident response.
Why Should You Implement a CLM?
Here are Five Great Reasons for You to Do So:
1. Enhanced Enterprise Security
A CLM policy strengthens your security by keeping your PKI assets at peak performance. Your certificates are regularly renewed, preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data and communications. Outages are far less likely, especially from expired certificates, the most common cause of PKI-related outages. In addition to the security benefits, this improves operational efficiency.
A CLM policy also puts you in the best position to mitigate and prevent cyberthreats, including man-in-the-middle attacks and phishing scams. When you can automate certificate renewal, you can easily adapt to evolving security (cryptographic) requirements, such as larger keys, and implement new technologies like post-quantum cryptography.
2. Improved Compliance
Because they are central to so many security features, compliance regimes and security certification standards almost all have requirements to use digital certificates for various functions. Having a CLM helps you to comply in the first place and ensure that you stay in compliance.
Broad security frameworks like NIST 800-53 (a.k.a the NIST CSF or Cybersecurity Framework), PCI DSS and SOC 2 all have certificate-based requirements. So do government regulatory regimes, such as HIPAA, GDPR and eIDAS. Implementing and maintaining any of these standards without a CLM in place creates unacceptable risk.
3. Certificate Authority Errors
In recent years, there has been more than one incident in which an error by a certificate authority forced it to revoke certificates issued to customers.
One recent one involved (ahem!) DigiCert. We recognized that an already-fixed bug had caused an error in the verification process for TLS certificates. Under the Baseline Requirements of the CA/Browser Forum, such certificates must be revoked within 24 hours. We worked with the major browser vendors to get a few more days to work with customers who were unable to comply with such a schedule.
In cases like this, the customers that get through it quickest and most easily are those that have automated the process of identifying and replacing such certificates. When CA errors happen, with public or private CAs, a CLM policy with automation is the difference between an annoyance and a ruined week for admins with the possibility of service outages.
4. Enhanced Trust and Reputation
A strong CLM policy demonstrates an organization’s commitment to data security, helping you to build trust with customers and partners. With a policy, you can also manage governance centrally across jurisdictions, even between isolated international PKI silos. The result is an enhanced reputation and a competitive advantage.
5. Improved Monitoring and Incident Response
A CLM includes inventory management and usage tracking, which can help organizations analyze certificate usage patterns, identifying anomalies or unauthorized access that might indicate security threats. In the event of a security incident, a CLM policy can help organizations quickly identify compromised certificates or those involved in unauthorized activities.
If a certificate is compromised, a CLM policy outlines the procedures for revoking it, preventing further misuse. CLM policies can also support post-incident investigations by providing information about certificate usage and history, aiding in identifying the root cause and preventing future incidents.
