The technology you use at work must be secure, reliable, and transparent…and it should work together. If your goals are limiting risk, retaining staff without burning them out, and avoiding outages, you have to be able to trust the tools and devices you use. Enter public key infrastructure (PKI), the unsung hero of digital trust.
But what is PKI?
PKI is a cryptographic system used to issue and verify identities for users and machines, and helps encrypt communications between them. Simply put, PKI ensures that only authorized users and devices can access your critical systems, data, and resources. This translates to a more secure environment for everyone—from your customers and employees to the machines that power your operations.
As new possibilities in algorithms and computing emerge, this cornerstone of digital trust is changing quickly. Here are five things you should know to stay abreast of PKI.
#1: Every person and machine needs an identity, and those identities must be managed.
Imagine a world without identification—and imagine how difficult it would be to trust each other without it. Anyone could walk into any building, access any information, and potentially cause significant chaos, with few measures to hold them accountable. This is essentially the unmanaged IT environment: a free-for-all where anyone or anything can access your systems without proper verification.
This is where machine identities become critical. In the digital world, identities validate who’s doing what, whether it’s a human employee logging into a system or a server communicating with another server. These identities act as digital passports, granting access based on predefined permissions. Now for the surprising number: according to insights from Keyfactor CTO Ted Shorter, machine identities outnumber human identities 45 to 1.
These machine identities are represented by digital certificates, containing public and private keys generated by complex algorithms. They act as secure credentials, allowing authorized devices to communicate and access resources within your network. But the sheer volume of machine identities necessitates effective PKI management to mitigate the risk of exploitation. As your IT environment grows more complex and cybercriminals become more sophisticated, a proactive approach is key. Leaving machine identities open to compromise can provide a backdoor for attackers, exposing sensitive data and causing significant disruption. The costs of damage control can be significant, both financially and in terms of your business reputation.
#2: PKI is everywhere, and it only takes one certificate to cause an outage.
When we say PKI is crucial, we mean it. It’s the backbone of secure communication and access control across a wide range of applications. For example:
- Email, messaging, and websites: PKI ensures the people and machines communicating with each other are who they say the yare. For example, when you send an encrypted email or visit a secure website with the familiar padlock symbol, PKI is at work verifying the browser’s server and encrypting the communication behind the scenes.
- Internet of Things (IoT) products: IoT encompasses a range of technology, from smart home products to medical devices. PKI plays a crucial role in securing communication between these devices and the central systems they interact with, preventing unauthorized access.
- Remote work: PKI enables secure authentication for laptops, tablets, and other devices used by employees outside the traditional office environment. It ensures that only approved devices interact with company resources, whether internally or remotely.
And these are just a few ways PKI is applied. In fact, the challenge lies in managing the ever-growing number of certificates required for these various use cases.
Manually managing certificates can be costly, demanding a good deal of time and attention. Imagine juggling hundreds, or even thousands of individual certificates with their own expiration date and access permissions. The risk? Missing a single certificate renewal can lead to outages, disrupting critical operations and frustrating employees.
And it’s not the certificates you know about that should worry you, but the ones you don’t. Every organization deals with some level of “shadow IT,” where employees install or use unauthorized applications or create ad hoc certificates. These certificates are lurking within your infrastructure–and their expiration could potentially cause disruptions at the worst possible moment.
#3: Managing PKI is taxing your teams’ bandwidth.
While PKI is essential for security, the reality is that few organizations have dedicated teams to manage it. The responsibility often falls to overworked security, IT, or infrastructure teams who are juggling multiple priorities. These teams may have a general understanding of cybersecurity, but they often lack the specialized knowledge required for effective PKI management.
This lack of expertise is a fast track to wasted time and resources. Wrangling PKI tasks takes these teams longer than necessary, diverting their attention from critical digital transformation initiatives and core security responsibilities. (Imagine the frustration when a security analyst who should be focusing on proactive threat hunting is bogged down in the minutiae of certificate renewal!)
When IT burnout and turnover are already high and climbing higher, PKI can be a tipping point. When it takes eight staff members more than five hours to identify and remediate a single PKI-related outage, you’re looking at a significant amount of time and labor diverted from more strategic endeavors. One solution is PKI-as-a-Service (PKIaaS) providers like Keyfactor. We provide access to a team of PKI experts who handle the day-to-day tasks of certificate issuance, renewal, and revocation to free up your internal teams to focus on core competencies and proactive initiatives.
#4: Best practices are always changing.
On a technical level, you have a degree of flexibility in PKI implementation–you can choose whatever hashing algorithms, validity periods, and Certificate Authorities (CAs) that suit your needs. However, straying too far from best practices can backfire. Web browsers are vigilant about security standards, and certificates that don’t adhere to best practices can trigger warnings to users of your website or application.
There’s another layer of complexity in the world of compliance: regulations like NIS2 and DORA in the EU or SOC-2 in the United States have specific requirements for PKI implementation. Staying up-to-date on these nuances and integrating them into your PKI strategy can be a daunting task for internal teams, but a failed compliance audit can result in hefty fines and reputational damage.
And the world of best practices is constantly evolving. Certificate lifecycles are getting shorter, requiring more frequent renewals, and key lengths are increasing to stay ahead of evolving threats. Plus, the cryptographic algorithms that underpin PKI are not static. As attackers develop new methods to exploit vulnerabilities, certain algorithms fall out of favor. For example, the potential threat of quantum computing is driving the development of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms to eventually replace current standards.
#5: Modern PKI tools and deep PKI knowledge are key.
The right tools and strategies can help you achieve PKI mastery. The first step is gaining complete visibility into your PKI landscape, shining light on the network of certificates scattered across devices, applications, and systems. Effective PKI management tools can conduct a proactive discovery, unearthing all certificates within your IT environment and compiling them into a unified hub. From here, you can automate tasks like certificate lifecycles (issuance, renewal, revocation) and implement stricter certificate policies that enhance your security posture.
PKI expertise doesn’t have to be homegrown. Store-bought is fine. When you’re looking to streamline infrastructure, develop customized strategies, and lay a solid PKI foundation, working with PKIaaS providers like Keyfactor can offer a valuable solution. With a strategic PKI partner, you can offload PKI management responsibilities to experts, freeing up your internal teams to focus on core business priorities.
Prioritize digital trust with the help of PKI experts
The importance of PKI is only growing as new security threats emerge and regulations become more complex. One thing remains constant: the need for the invisible DNA of digital trust to secure and verify machine identities.
By prioritizing PKI and implementing effective certificate management practices, your organization can lay a strong foundation for digital trust now and in the future. Keyfactor is here to help you streamline your PKI management, free up your internal resources, and empower your organization to scale and adapt with new technology.
Request a demo today to unlock the full potential of PKI for your organization.
