Certificates

This video explains the basics of what a certificate is and how the certificate lifecycle works.

What is a Certificate?

A certificate is a type of digital secret, but unlike other secrets, it contains extensive data used to verify the authenticity of a digital entity, such as a website, device, or other identity. When that entity has a valid certificate, your communication with that endpoint is secure and encrypted. For example, in WhatsApp your conversations are fully encrypted, so if a hacker extracts your conversations, they can’t decrypt them. They will just see a bunch of gibberish.

The validity of a certificate is determined by a third-party organization called a Public Certificate Authority (CA), whose trust is universally recognized. A little bit more on this later. This verification ensures that digital assets are legitimate and reduces the risk of various attacks.

TLS certificates (also called SSL certificates) form the foundation for encryption, protecting data exchanged between users and websites. Essentially, a certificate enables secure transmission of data. With a valid certificate, a website or other digital identity ensures that hackers cannot decrypt the data sent between the client and the server.

Public vs Private Certificate Authorities

There are two main types of certificate authorities that each serve a specific purpose: Public and Private CAs.
Public CAs issue certificates that are publicly trusted and recognized by major web browsers and operating systems. Some examples include Let's Encrypt, DigiCert, Comodo, and GlobalSign. Certificates that are issued by a Public CA ensure that customer-facing websites and services maintain secure transactions, protect customer data, and enhance trust by preventing disruptions due to expired certificates.

Private CAs are used within an organization and internally trusted. They issue certificates for internal use cases, such as securing internal servers, applications, and communications within the company’s network which means they do not require a Public CA.

How does the Certificate Workflow actually work?

Let’s take a website, for example. On a basic level, when you visit a website like gmail.com, which is protected with TLS, your browser requests the website to identify itself. The web server running gmail.com sends a copy of its certificate along with the server’s public key to your browser. Your browser then checks the trustworthiness of the website based on its certificate.

It verifies that:

• The Certificate Authority (CA) is trusted.
• The certificate has not expired.
• The certificate has not been revoked.
• The certificate name matches the web server being connected to.

If these checks are successful, your browser generates a session key, encrypts it with the server's public key, and sends it back to the gmail.com web server. Now, any data exchanged between your browser and the web server will be encrypted using this session key, ensuring secure communication. The same applies to any other identity such as a device, website, user, or service.

What is Certificate Lifecycle Management?

In enterprises, certificates are crucial for securing data and communications but can be difficult to configure, manage and track. Both external and internal certificates can multiply quickly, and if a certificate expires it can bring business to a standstill. Manual certificate renewal and issuance are complicated and time consuming, and are an unnecessary burden to your development team.

That’s why it’s so important to be able to automate and simplify all the steps of a certificate’s lifecycle from its creation to disposal while easily tracking expiration, issuance and renewal. That’s where Akeyless comes in.

Akeyless’s Certificate Lifecycle Management solution is designed to simplify the management of these essential certificates, ensuring your digital assets remain secure and trustworthy without manual hassle or complex administration. Akeyless CLM allows you to automate the entire lifecycle of your certificates—from issuance to provisioning, renewal to revocation, as well as replacement.

Moreover, you can securely store your certificates inside Akeyless with distributed cryptography for maximum protection. This not only saves time and reduces the risk of human error, but also ensures continuous compliance and robust security across your digital assets.