Best Practices for Improving Your SSL Certificate Management Lifecycle

Over the past couple of years, security certificates have skyrocketed in importance and popularity as SSL certificates become an important marker of online trustworthiness. If you’re a website administrator, you must understand that without proper management and tracking, your SSL certificate might expire unannounced and inevitably sabotage your most important applications. 

Read on to learn why SSL certificate management is important and how you can effectively manage your SSL certificates for optimum security and visibility. 

Why is SSL Certificate Management Important?

SSL certificate management describes a system for managing digital certificates through their entire lifecycles, from acquisition right to expiration.

Certificate management is a critical aspect of an organization’s digital defenses. The absence of an SSL lock on your website will prompt browser warnings and consequently prompt users to flee. Similarly, weakly hashed or expired certificates are an invitation to hackers. It’s the proverbial case of leaving the door to your house open when leaving for vacation.

Thankfully, you can shield yourself from negative repercussions by implementing these proven SSL management best practices.

1. Create and Maintain an Exhaustive Inventory

You subject yourself to security threats and application outages if you don’t keep a strict inventory of your certificates. So start by keeping track of all the issued certificates from your private Certificate Authority (CA). 

Manually, it can be hectic to ensure that you’ve collected everything, from internal CAs to network devices. To build an accurate, all-encompassing inventory, consider automating a system that quickly scans your entire digital infrastructure to identify all digital assets, including where they are installed, who owns them, and how they are utilized. This will help you identify all the certificates that are critical to the availability and reliability of your company’s digital infrastructure.

Thankfully, you don’t have to automate an inventory system from scratch if you already have an SSL certificate manager. Such tools are purpose-built to issue, renew, govern, manage, and automate the lifecycles of any SSL certificate from a single platform. 

2. Remediate Accordingly

Once you’ve pinpointed all the digital certificates present in your infrastructure, find and fix any and all loopholes. Ideally, this process should find weaknesses like hashes and weak keys and control the use of self-signed certificates and wildcards.

While at it, ensure you’re adequately protecting private keys and that you’ve renewed any expired security certificates. Finally, remove all rogue and weak certificates from your certificate ecosystem for maximum visibility and remediation.

3. Define and Enforce Policy

Without an exhaustive SSL and PKI management policy, then the above best practices won’t bear fruit. They won’t be as effective.

At the most basic level, your policy should cover all possible certificate owners and approvers, from IT staff and DevOps to PKI admins and network admins. Beyond that, it should also define their roles and responsibilities while leaving no stone unturned.

Lastly, a good certificate management policy is one that provides a standardized approach to certificate issuance, renewal, revocation, and removal. If it can’t serve these four purposes exhaustively, then it needs rethinking and readjusting.

4. Establish Escalation Workflows

As you identify certificate owners, remember that any requests for issuance, revocation, and renewal will need to be routed to the right parties as well. 

To ensure there are no bottlenecks—should an employee leave the company or ask for a leave—there needs to be an escalation path too. This is particularly essential for renewals, to ensure there’s no margin for downtime due to expired certificates.

Take SSL Certificate Management Seriously

To steer completely clear of application outages and security vulnerabilities, make sure your organization takes SSL certificate management seriously and adheres to the above best-practices to a tee. It’s worth it!