Managed PKI Certificates

Managed PKI Certificates

A modern, scalable cloud-hosted, high-assurance, fully WebTrust-audited Public Key Infrastructure certificate product for users, devices, workloads, and services

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What are Managed PKI Certificates?

Managed PKI Certificates are digital identities issued from a managed, cloud-hosted platform that utilizes a highly secure, multi-tenant architecture. This product is uniquely governed by a continuous WebTrust audit, providing customers with a shared, high-assurance infrastructure that maintains strict logical isolation for certificate issuance, policy enforcement, and lifecycle automation.

Key Value Propositions

Security by Design

Security by design: shared hardware-rooted trust via FIPS 140-2 Level 3 HSMs, strong policy enforcement through template-based issuance, and tamper-evident audit trails for compliance evidence.

Operational Efficiency

Operational efficiency via automated enrollment, renewal, and rotation with turnkey integrations for your ecosystem: Active Directory, Kubernetes, MDM platforms, and SIEM systems.

Compliance and Governance

Compliance and governance with mapped controls and documented procedures aligned to SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, and NIST SP 800-53 frameworks commonly required by auditors.

Enterprise Scale

Enterprise scale with high availability and geo-resilience for bulk issuance across a global customer base: sub-second certificate issuance at multi-million-unit volumes per product cycle.

Core Capabilities: Issued from a dedicated private root of trust outside the CA/Browser Forum. WebTrust-compliant issuance governed by the same audit standards as public roots. Supports SCEP, EST, ACME, and REST API enrollment. All keys are HSM-backed with FIPS 140-2/3 alignment. High-availability OCSP and CRLs for real-time verification.

Key benefits

Root of Trust

Inherit SSL's WebTrust audit evidence for your PKI, without building or funding your own audit program.

WebTrust-Compliant

Partners, regulators, and customers can inspect your CA's audited governance, not just its certificates.

HSM-Backed Security

ACME, SCEP, EST, REST API enrollment, built for DevSecOps, Kubernetes, MDM, and factory-floor issuance.

Namespace Protection

All CA private keys generated and stored in certified hardware, never exportable in plaintext.

Automated Enrollment

Hybrid post-quantum profiles (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA) available at the Ecosystem/IoT tier.

Validation Services

Same API used for public-trust certificates, no separate integration required.

Elastic billing

Certificate inventory, expiration forecasting, immutable audit logs, SIEM/SOAR integration.

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Contact our PKI solution architects to design a Managed PKI deployment tailored to your environment. Our team will confirm your service tier fit, namespace requirements, and integration options for your enrollment systems (ACME, SCEP, EST, REST API).

Common Use Cases

High-Assurance IoT & Device Identity

High-assurance IoT and device identity for secure boot, firmware updates, and mutual TLS in industrial IoT, medical devices, automotive systems, and critical infrastructure.

Supply Chain Trust

Supply chain trust: providing cryptographic proof of trust for third-party onboarding, partner extranets, and supplier authentication in B2B ecosystems.

Regulatory Compliance

Regulatory compliance: meeting SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA Security Rule, GDPR Article 32, and PCI DSS v4 requirements via audit-ready certificate infrastructure with documented controls.

Zero Trust Architecture

Zero Trust architecture: securing machine-to-machine communication with audited governance. Every workload, service, and device gets a cryptographically verified identity enforced at connection time.

PQC Transition

PQC transition: testing quantum-resistant certificate profiles (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA) to future-proof internal systems before NIST PQC mandates become production requirements.

Platform Architecture

1
Onboarding
SSL provisions your tenant, vets and reserves your private namespaces, and configures RBAC for your team
2
Integrate
Configure your ACME client, MDM, Kubernetes cert-manager, or REST API integration to use your SSL tenant endpoint
3
Issue certificates
Your enrollment system requests certificates, SSL’s platform validates against your namespace policy and issues
4
Lifecycle management
Renewals, rekeys, and revocations are handled automatically or via API, inventory and expiration alerts keep you ahead of expirations
5
Compliance
Access SSL’s WebTrust audit reports to satisfy SOC2, HIPAA, or industry-specific requirements

Compliance & standards

WebTrust for CAs

SSL's dedicated PKI operations are covered by the same WebTrust audit as our public trust platform

FIPS 140-2 Level 3

FIPS 140-2 Level 3: all CA root and intermediate keys are generated and stored in certified HSMs, never exportable in plaintext: the protection profile required by federal procurement.

RFC 5280 (X.509)

All certificates conform to X.509 v3 / RFC 5280 structure: compatible with every PKI-capable operating system, device, and application in production use today.

ACME RFC 8555

Native ACME v2 (RFC 8555) support for automated certificate lifecycle management: works with cert-manager, Caddy, Traefik, Certbot, and every standard ACME client out of the box.

SCEP / EST

SCEP (Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol) and EST (Enrollment over Secure Transport, RFC 7030) support for MDM platforms, network device enrollment, and mobile certificate provisioning.

NIST PQC standards

NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standards: ML-KEM (key encapsulation), ML-DSA (digital signatures), and SLH-DSA (stateless hash-based signatures) hybrid profiles available on the Ecosystem tier.

Frequently asked questions

Managed PKI Certificates is a shared multi-tenant service, SSL retains the Root CA and the infrastructure is shared across customers with strict logical isolation. Dedicated PKI gives you your own Root CA and a private CA hierarchy that belongs entirely to your organization. Managed PKI Certificates is lower cost and requires no setup fee; Dedicated PKI gives you full hierarchy ownership and custom Certificate Policy support.

Your private namespaces are vetted and reserved, no other tenant can be issued certificates for your namespaces. Certificate-signing keys are cryptographically isolated per customer within the HSMs. RBAC restricts API access to your tenant only. All operations are audit-logged.

Active = Total Issued ? (Expired + Revoked). You are only billed for certificates that are currently valid in your environment. This model is favorable for DevOps and IoT scenarios where you issue frequently but many certificates expire quickly, you're never paying for stale inventory.

Yes, all tiers include access to SSL's WebTrust for CAs audit reports. These reports can be used as compliance evidence for SOC2, HIPAA, or specialized industry requirements.

Yes, if your needs grow to require a dedicated Root CA hierarchy or custom Certificate Policy, SSL can discuss a migration or upgrade path to Dedicated PKI products.

Ready to get started with Managed PKI Certificates?

Our enterprise team will work with you to understand your environment, namespace needs, and enrollment integration requirements, before any commitment.
Request a discovery call

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