SSL certificates are critical pillars of application security, helping to establish the credibility of an application and protect sensitive data exchanges. The internet would not be where it is today without them.
That said, managing SSL certificates are rife with many complexities and difficulties. An outdated SSL certificate can lead to content being inaccessible, which can lead to lost revenue, damaged business reputation, and lower productivity.
Unfortunately, maintaining SSL certificates can be a challenge. Many security, network, and application admins spend a lot of time ensuring that their SSL certificates comply with corporate policy, are up to date, and meet regulatory compliance.
In this blog post, we’ll look at the ways in which Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM) makes SSL certificate management simple for network, app, and security operations admins. SSL certificates go through the below lifecycle in enterprises, and Citrix ADM plays a pivotal role at each stage.
- Creation of CSR and SSL certificate
- Installation of SSL certificates
- Monitoring SSL certificates and SSL negotiated transactions
- Notification about expiring/expired certificates
- Updating expired certificates
- Deletion of unused certificates
Creation of CSR and SSL Certificate
Before requesting an SSL certificate, app owners must create a public-private key value pair and formulate it into a Certificate Signing Request (CSR), to be sent to a Certificate Authority (CA). Citrix ADM makes the whole process simple with the following steps.
- Create a public-private key value pair
- Create a Certificate Signing Request(CSR) with domain details, organization details and key value pair
- Send the CSR to a Certificate Authority(CA)
- Get the SSL certificate from CA
Installation of SSL Certificates
Large applications in enterprises typically span across several virtual servers spread across multiple ADC instances. This can make certificate installation for these apps a manual and error-prone task. With Citrix ADM, you can easily install SSL certificates on multiple ADC instances with a few clicks. Learn more.
Monitoring SSL Certificates and SSL Negotiated Transactions
Monitoring SSL certificates spread across numerous ADC instances in a large enterprise is an onerous task. Citrix ADM SSL dashboard gives visibility into your entire organization’s SSL infrastructure at a glance and clearly highlights any deviation in compliance to enterprise SSL policy.
Citrix ADM classifies the various managed SSL certificates and helps answer questions like
- Self-Signed vs CA Signed: Are you using any self-signed certificates in production?
- Signature algorithms used in issuing the certificate: Are weak signature algorithms used in issuing certificates?
- Usage status: Are there are SSL certificates that aren’t linked to an application?
- Issuer – name of the Certificate Authority: Are there certificates from a Certificate Authority (CA) that isn’t recommended?
- Key Strength: Are weaker keys used in Certificate creation?
For each certificate ADM provides details like ADC instance, domain, expiry details, issuer, algorithm, and key strength. Learn more about using the SSL dashboard.
Inventory of Expiring/Expired SSL Certificates
In a large organization, there might be several thousand SSL certificates spread across multiple ADC instances. It’s a laborious and time-consuming task to track which SSL certificates are expiring/have expired. Citrix ADM makes it easy to track the expiry of your SSL certificates in two ways:
- Graphical representation of certificates in the Citrix ADM SSL dashboard.
- Notification about expiry of certificates on your preferred channel (Slack, email, ServiceNow, PagerDuty). ServiceNow integration makes the SSL certificate lifecycle management truly automated, creating a ticket when a certificate is about to expire, letting the SecOps admin know to renew certificates. Learn more.
Ensuring Compliance to Enterprise Policy
Enterprises define various SSL compliance parameters like ciphers, protocols, and Certificate Authorities to comply with their IT security policy. Citrix ADM helps you define your SSL settings enterprise-wide in one place and flags deviations if they occur.
Adherence to enterprise policy for SSL certificates and transactions helps answer questions like:
- Recommended key strength: Are there any key strengths that aren’t recommended that are being used for issuing the SSL certificates?
- Recommended Signature Algorithms: Are there algorithms that aren’t recommended that are being used for issuing SSL certificates?
- Recommended trusted CA: Is any certificate issued by a CA that isn’t recommended?
- Recommended SSL protocol: Are there any applications accepting transactions over not recommended SSL protocols?
Learn more about configuring enterprise policy.
Updating SSL Certificates
Keeping SSL certificates up to date is a difficult task. When a certificate is about to expire, you can create a public-private key pair and a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) from Citrix ADM. The CSR can then be sent to a Certificate Authority (CA) to issue a new SSL certificate. Citrix ADM then helps update the SSL certificates on one or more ADC instances effortlessly from a unified console. Learn more.
Delete Unused SSL Certificates
It’s critical to continuously track and delete expired and unused SSL certificates to clean up the certificate inventory and make it manageable. Citrix ADM gives you visibility into all your expired and unused SSL certificates, and you can delete all expired/unused certificates in one shot. Without Citrix ADM, it’s a time-consuming process.
Get Started Today!
SSL certificate outages are costly, and SSL certificate management in large enterprises can be cumbersome and involve significant operational overheads. Citrix ADM makes SSL certificate lifecycle management seamless at each stage of the certificate lifecycle.
Try SSL certificate lifecycle management today on Citrix ADM service. Citrix ADM service is a cloud-based offering of Citrix ADM and is available as express offering to help you get started at no cost. Learn more today!
