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Storing and Retrieving Third-Party Certificates in Azure Key Vault
Storing, managing, and renewing certificates can be a hassle. When will they expire? Where do I store them? Who has access to them and how is that controlled? How do I track the expiry date of these certificates so we don’t catch ourselves in a Sev 1 outage because a cert expired (hey, remember this)?
Azure Key Vault can generate certificates and automatically renew them, which makes most of the concerns listed above a non-issue. The difficulty is when we don’t have control over the process for generating and renewing certificates belonging to a trusted third-party. Luckily for us, Key Vault makes this really simple.
Supported File Types
Key Vault supports PFX- or PEM-formatted files. If you’re unfamiliar with the terminology, don’t worry. I’ll break down the difference between the two formats here 👇 in the form of a Q&A.
What is PFX? What does PFX stand for?
PFX stands for “Personal Information Exchange.” It’s the file format for the PKCS#12 standard. Think of PKCS as a family of standards that dictate how we should store and share certificates, keys, and other secure data. This particular standard (#12) says we should be able to store the private key and public key certificate in a single, encrypted file. Files…
