CertKit SSL Certificate Management

There is a public record of every TLS certificate ever issued for your domain, and anyone can search it. Most people who run infrastructure have never heard of these certificate transparency logs. So I read our own log, and here's what anyone could learn

You're probably running a TLS configuration that the IETF says is "non-conformant". But you didn't do anything wrong. In July, the IETF published a pair of RFCs that took away three of TLS 1.2's key exchange methods and froze the rest of it. The phrase th

In May I wrote that you probably don't need private PKI for internal infrastructure, because DNS validation gets a publicly trusted certificate onto hosts that never touch the internet. In June I pointed out that Apple enforces an 825-day cap on private c

Chrome's root program decides what certificates will be trusted by Chrome, and what they are allowed to do. Recently, Google decided that client authentication isn't on the list. Under Chrome Root Program Policy v1.8, every certificate issued on or after

Every HTTPS connection starts with a TLS handshake. It's the security check, answering "are you who you say you are?" and "how are we going to keep this conversation secret?". There's a lot going on during the handshake, and there used to be even more bef

The old deployment flow expected a lot from you. You had to know what format your certificate needed to be in. You had to know where it should be stored on the target system. Then you had to review and customize a deployment script in a code editor before

Every certificate renewal automation tool has to answer one architecture question before it does anything else: where does the private key get generated? A reader who used to be "the certificate guy" at his organization emailed me this week to ask about e

How do we keep our Sonicwall certificates up to date as certificate lifetimes get shorter? We're already at 200 day certs with 100 then 47 day certificates coming soon. A certificate you used to touch once every year now needs replacing up to twelve times

On June 3, Let's Encrypt announced that the post-quantum web is going to run on something called Merkle Tree Certificates. The internet did what it does and turned this into a doomsday Q-Day countdown. The quantum computers are coming, your certificates a

Most security vendors hide their documentation behind a login. Some don't write it at all. You get a sales page, a demo, and a request to install an agent on your servers, and you're expected to trust that the thing does what the marketing says. That's ba