The public key infrastructure (PKI) is a framework that facilitates secure, trusted communication, authentication, and data protection over networks.
This feature is crucial in various security options, such as SSL/TLS, code signing, email encryption, and smart card authentication. Nevertheless, creating and installing a PKI infrastructure system is not that simple.
Such a framework must involve strategic planning, effective implementation, and proper management for purposes of concreting industry standards and best practices.
Inadequately designed or operated PKI architecture systems cause unauthorized access to organizational data, wrongful usage of certificates by third parties, corruption of keys, malpractice, and ineffective operation of business tasks.
Consequently, this blog post analyzes the best practices for designing an efficient PKI infrastructure that protects your company from strong, assured, extensible, and efficient attacks.
Best Practices For Designing An Efficient PKI Infrastructure
The first step in designing an efficient PKI is scrutinizing your company’s necessities. It will be a great aid in outlining the scope, objectives, and parameters of your proposed PKI project.
For example, here are some questions you may ask yourself to determine this:
What specific use cases and applications does your company need PKI for?
What security measures guide data protection and those dictating your organization’s compliance?
What do you have regarding existing resources and infrastructure, or what do you require to support your PKI project?
These questions will aid in identifying the primary stakeholders of your PKI project, their positions on project issues, their expectations of you, their roles, and the tasks they will perform.
You can also determine the technical and operational requirements for your PKI infrastructure. For example, these requirements may include:
The number and types of certificate authorities (CAs) that are deployable for your environment
The certificate hierarchy and the trust model that you need to establish
Considering requirements and existing best practices is essential in designing an organization’s PKI structure. However, developing a PKI infrastructure is not a one-time project.
It requires ongoing maintenance and continuous improvement to meet your organization’s changing needs and challenges. Therefore, it would be best to use PKI design & implementation experts who can help you design, implement, manage, and optimize your PKI infrastructure.
A crucial good practice in building a secure PKI system is to attain high availability and redundancy. Thus, your PKI infrastructure will be persistent and robust even when your networks break down or become a target of attacks.
Here’s what you can do to plan for high availability and redundancy:
Decide on the approach you will use to develop the distributed architecture of your CAs. Doing this will act as backup, assuring possible attack or vulnerability at a particular entry point. Several subordinates can be under root CA, or you can certify CAs from different hierarchies.
Additionally, ensure that you establish disaster recovery solutions for your CAs. You can use it for resilience and recovery of PKI infrastructure if emergence occurs. Hence, you can practice backing up your CA database daily, keys, certificates, logs, and configurations.
As such, it might be necessary that you should regularly perform recovery tests. In addition, designing a resilient and readily available PKI infrastructure would enhance service reliability and performance assurance for your firm.
Secure certificate lifecycle management helps you manage the creation, deployment, renewal, and revocation of digital certificates in a network. It will ensure that your issue, usage, cancellation, and expiration certificates are secure and controlled.
Here’s an example of what you can do to accomplish this:
Put processes into place for issuing and revoking certificates about your CAs. Such measures will enable you to confirm certificate requesters’ identities and valid credentials and cancel a compromised certificate usage. You can, for instance, use RA’s or OCSP to validate a request or inquire about the status of the certificates.
Ensure timely monitoring and renewal of certificates for your CAs. This approach will prevent certificate outages or errors caused by expired certificates. You can also send emails from programmed alert systems or scripts notifying relevant certificate owners and administrators of the impending expiry periods.
On average, organizations lose 9.2% of revenue due to poor contract management, which can be improved by automating contract processes and using certificate lifecycle management software.
Good and secure PKI infrastructure requires excellent key management. It is how you refer to handling your key cryptographic correctly and with due care.
The cryptographic keystore is a place where it stores some unique data (cryptographic keys — also known as secret codes), which enable it to encrypt data and communications on your behalf.
They also serve to sign and verify your digital certificates, which are electronic copies, to ascertain your identity and authorization. Properly used keys ensure the information is confidential, intact, and readily available for your data and certificates.
You could use robust encryption algorithms and key lengths as an example to avoid unauthorized access or modification of your data. You could also renew or revoke your certifications before their expiration or compromise dates to mitigate the likelihood of service disruption or security risks.
Monitoring and auditing your PKI infrastructure constitute a crucial practice in designing an adequate PKI system. It will, in turn, help you identify and rectify whatever is wrong or unusual, threatening the security, reliability, flexibility, or efficacy of your infrastructure.
For example, here are key actions you can perform:
Put in place a logging and tracking tool for your PKI. It will help you learn about the PKI components' status, like CAs, RAs, OCSPs, certificates, keys, logs, and configuration.
For example, you can use event logs, performance counters, health checks, alerts or dashboards for monitoring your PKI environment.
Ensure you understand what the standards for the PKI infrastructure in the industry entail. By doing so, you will remain current on all affairs relating to PKI systems and new approaches that can be used to boost PKI security and performance.
Through industry publications, blogs, forums, webinars and events, you can update yourselves about the best PKI practices.
By following these best practices and working with the best PKI design and implementation specialists, you can build PKI-based multi-option security supports such as SSL/TLS, code-signing, and email encryption.