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US 2011/0219227 A1Published application
Automated certificate management
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsTariq Sharif, Colin H. Brace, Nakul Garg
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AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsTariq Sharif, Colin H. Brace, Nakul Garg
Estimating the term…
A certificate management system provides automated management of certificate lifecycles and certificate distribution. Rather than depend upon an administrator to manually distribute and manage certificates, the system self-generates certificates, distributes the certificates to appropriate servers or other parties, and transitions from old certificates to new certificates in a well-defined manner that avoids breaking functionality. After generating one or more certificates, the system securely shares certificates in a way that parties that use them can find the new certificates without an administrator manually distributing the certificates. When it is time to update certificates, the system generates new certificates and shares the new certificates in a similar way. During a transition period, the system provides a protocol by which both old and new certificates can be used to perform authenticated access to resources, so that the transition from an old to a new certificate does not break services.
A computer-implemented method for automatically generating and sharing security certificates, the method comprising:
A computer system for automatically managing certificates shared by multiple servers, the system comprising:
A computer-readable storage medium comprising instructions for controlling a computer system to periodically update certificates used for communication between servers, wherein the instructions, when executed, cause a processor to perform actions comprising:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.