What makes SSL certificate tracking hard?

In today’s digital landscape, SSL certificates are the backbone of online security, ensuring encrypted connections and trustworthiness. But managing them is no simple task. The sheer scale of certificates, their rapid issuance and expiration, and the complexity of deployment create challenges for organizations of all sizes. Without the right tools, staying on top of SSL certificates can feel like an impossible puzzle.

So what makes SSL certificate tracking hard?

Two things: sheer numbers and decentralization.

Here’s the scope of the challenge:

• 🌍 Over 1 billion valid SSL certificates exist at any moment. 1,057,885,847 right now.

• 📈 10 million are issued every day, and 10 million expire. Approximately.

• 🔗 One certificate can:

  • Contain multiple names.
  • Be deployed on multiple servers.
  • Be served alongside another (e.g., RSA + ECDSA).

• 📡 Servers can:

  • Serve multiple certificates.
  • Have multiple names and IPs.

• ⏳ Certificates expire frequently:

  • Every 3 months for most.
  • Every year for the rest.

As SSL certificates grow in number and their validity periods shrink, tracking them is only getting harder. There are talks to reduce the maximum validity periods to 90 days or 45 days, and I’ve even heard 6 days.

Your organization can use Certificate Transparency (CT) to monitor certificates… but what does it take?

• Deduplicate, index, and manage billions of certificates.
• Map them meaningfully to your domains and servers.
• Build a system to surface this information to your users—in near real-time.

That’s a tall order.

That’s what SSLBoard.com does, so you don’t have to.

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash