Episode 119 — Spotlight: Public Key Infrastructure Certificates (SC-17)
Public Key Infrastructure Certificates (SC-17) governs the issuance, management, and validation of digital certificates that anchor trust for users, services, and devices. For exam purposes, recognize that SC-17 focuses on how identities are bound to keys and how that binding is proven during communications or code signing. It expects approved certificate authorities, documented certificate profiles, defined assurance levels, and processes for renewal, revocation, and compromise response. The goal is to ensure that TLS, mutual TLS, device enrollment, and signing workflows rest on verifiable, well-managed credentials rather than ad hoc or self-signed artifacts that cannot be trusted at scale.
Operationalizing SC-17 requires lifecycle discipline. Organizations maintain PKI hierarchies or leverage trusted providers, enforce certificate enrollment via authenticated requests, and implement automated renewal to avoid outages. Validation uses OCSP or CRLs, with stapling and strict revocation checking for sensitive endpoints. Private PKI segments issue certificates for internal services, with name constraints and short lifetimes to limit blast radius. Evidence includes CA policies, issuance logs, certificate inventories by domain and purpose, and documented responses to key compromise. Metrics measure renewal timeliness, percentage of endpoints with valid chains, and rate of deprecated algorithms in circulation. Pitfalls include unmanaged shadow CAs, long-lived wildcard certificates, weak subject validation, and failure to propagate revocations to dependent systems. Mastering SC-17 demonstrates control of the trust fabric that underlies encrypted transport, device identity, and software authenticity. Produced by BareMetalCyber.com, where you’ll find more cyber audio courses, books, and information to strengthen your educational path. Also, if you want to stay up to date with the latest news, visit DailyCyber.News for a newsletter you can use, and a daily podcast you can commute with.
