Digital security certificate selection and distribution

A method of operating a digital security service, the method comprising:

• establishing a plurality of handler entities, each individually configured to interface with at least one of a plurality of certificate authorities to request issuance of associated digital certificates;
• presenting a standardized interface for requesting entities to issue requests for digital certificates, wherein the requests comprise certificate authority-agnostic requests;
• receiving a request from a requesting entity for a digital certificate, wherein the request originates from the requesting entity as a certificate authority-agnostic request;
• processing at least the request to identify a domain associated with the request;
• processing at least the request against evaluation criteria to select a certificate authority from among the plurality of certificate authorities for issuance of the digital certificate;
• based on the domain, performing an audit process to establish the request as a valid request;
• and
• responsive to the request being a valid request, initiating a selected handler entity on behalf of the requesting entity to compose a certificate signing request (CSR) customized to the selected certificate authority, and interface with the selected certificate authority using the CSR instead of the certificate authority-agnostic request for issuance and delivery of the digital certificate.

A digital security system, comprising:

• a client interface service configured to present a standardized interface for requesting entities to initiate requests for digital security certificates;
• the client interface service configured to receive the requests for digital security certificates issued by the requesting entities, wherein the requests originate from the requesting entities as certificate authority-agnostic requests;
• a certificate service comprising at least one microprocessor configured to process the requests to identify domains associated with the requests and process the requests against evaluation criteria to select certificate authorities to handle the requests;
• based on the domains, the certificate service configured to perform audit processes to establish the requests as approved requests;
• and
• responsive to ones of the requests being valid requests, the certificate service configured to initiate selected handler processes configured to compose certificate signing requests (CSRs) customized to the ones of the selected certificate authorities and interface with the associated ones of the selected certificate authorities using the CSRs instead of the certificate authority-agnostic requests for issuance and delivery of the digital security certificates.