Automated certificate management

Abstract

A certificate management system provides automated management of certificate lifecycles and certificate distribution. Rather than depend upon an administrator to manually distribute and manage certificates, the system self-generates certificates, distributes the certificates to appropriate servers or other parties, and transitions from old certificates to new certificates in a well-defined manner that avoids breaking functionality. After generating one or more certificates, the system securely shares certificates in a way that parties that use them can find the new certificates without an administrator manually distributing the certificates. When it is time to update certificates, the system generates new certificates and shares the new certificates in a similar way. During a transition period, the system provides a protocol by which both old and new certificates can be used to perform authenticated access to resources, so that the transition from an old to a new certificate does not break services.

Description

Background technique [0001] Many organizations and systems include server computer systems that provide various important functions to the organization. For example, even a small business may have an email server, one or more database servers, a corporate intranet portal hosted by a web server, a file server, and so on. These functions may reside on a single computer system or on several computer systems, such as to increase scalability and provide each function with sufficient resources based on expected or measured load. such as MICROSOFT TM WINDOWS TM Products such as Small Business Server provide multiple server functions in a single product. [0002] When an organization has multiple servers, the servers may include various authentication mechanisms and security protocols to allow the servers to trust each other and to allow users to log in to access the functionality provided by each server. A security system for allowing servers to communicate using a single login i...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Also, such products rely on administrators to do the heavy lifting of sharing these certificates across the farm

For many organizations, especially small businesses, where experienced administrators are not typically employed, this assumption often results in a loss of functionality and servers not communicating properly to provide the organization with the expected functionality

Even when administrators do regularly replace old certificates with new ones, there is a possibility that something in the system might break due to this sudden change because other things that depend on the system were not given advance warning of the change

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