TLS Server Certificate Management

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has released a draft of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Practice Guide Special Publication 1800-16, Securing Web Transactions: Transport Layer Security (TLS) Server Certificate Management, for public comment. See the two-page fact sheet for an overview of the project.

This practice guide can benefit executives, chief Information security officers, system administrators, or anyone who has a stake in protecting his or her organization's data, privacy, and overall operational security.

The NCCoE released the full draft which comprises the following volumes:

SP 1800-16A: Executive Summary (pdf)
SP 1800-16B: Security Risks and Recommended Best Practices (pdf)
SP 1800-16C: Approach, Architecture, and Security Characteristics (pdf)
SP 1800-16D: How-To-Guides (pdf)

The comment period is open now until Friday, September 13, 2019. We will also accept comments via email at tls-cert-mgmt-nccoe@nist.gov.

The NCCoE at NIST recognizes the vital importance of securing web transactions and other communications between clients and servers for organizations. This project uses commercially available technologies to demonstrate how medium and large enterprises that rely on Transport Layer Security (TLS) can secure both customer-facing and internal applications can better manage TLS server certificates by:

Defining operational and security policies; identifying roles and responsibilities
Establishing comprehensive certificate inventories and ownership tracking
Conducting continuous monitoring of certificate operational and security status
Automating certificate management to minimize human error and maximize efficiency on a large scale
Enabling rapid migration to new certificates and keys when cryptographic mechanisms are found to be weak, compromised or vulnerable

In December 2018, the NCCoE released Volumes A and B of this guide to provide enterprises actionable guidance to help them establish and implement a formal TLS server certificate management program. The received comments were adjudicated and integrated into the updated draft versions of Volume A and B. With the release of the full guide, organizations can advance their TLS management efforts by reading Volume C which explains our approach, architecture, and security characteristics, and Volume D which contains the how-to-guides to build the example solutions.

Although client certificates may optionally be used in TLS to perform mutual authentication, managing client certificates is outside this project's scope.

Questions? Contact us at tls-cert-mgmt-nccoe@nist.gov.

Collaborating Vendors

Organizations participating in this project submitted their capabilities in response to an open call in the Federal Register for all sources of relevant security capabilities from academia and industry (vendors and integrators). The following respondents with relevant capabilities or product components (identified as “Technology Partners/Collaborators” herein) signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement to collaborate with NIST in a consortium to build this example solution.

_{Certain commercial entities, equipment, products, or materials may be identified by name or company logo or other insignia in order to acknowledge their participation in this collaboration or to describe an experimental procedure or concept adequately. Such identification is not intended to imply special status or relationship with NIST or recommendation or endorsement by NIST or NCCoE; neither is it intended to imply that the entities, equipment, products, or materials are necessarily the best available for the purpose.}

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Interested in joining the TLS Server Certificate Management Community of Interest? Contact us!

A Community of Interest is a group of professionals and technical advisors convened to support the cybersecurity resiliency of the U.S. economy. Read More.