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Certificate management

Generate, rotate, and revoke certificates when you need them

Automate the certificate management process so you can spend less time on setup and more time building.

Challenge

Managing certificates shouldn’t take weeks

Manually designing, launching, and administering certificate management infrastructure is time-consuming, requiring multiple tools and processes. This often means that certificates are only rotated once a year, leading to situations where they expire unexpectedly, causing application downtime — and security risks.

Solution

On-demand certificates without the wait

HashiCorp Vault's public key infrastructure (PKI) secrets engine changes the game with dynamic  X.509 certificates that can be generated on demand — no manual steps, no waiting. Vault takes care of private keys, certificate signing requests (CSRs), and verification, letting your apps get their own certificates safely and instantly. Now you’ve got seamless scaling, fewer risks, and certificates that just work.


Benefits

Easier scaling for large workloads

Automated processes and dynamic certificate generation let your teams focus on what matters most: delivering quality applications without the headaches of manual management.

  • Reduce riskACL policies and allowed/denied parameters restrict how users access and create certificates and certificate authorities. Plus, automate lifecycle management with shorter TTLs.
  • Move fasterAllow the deployment of additional CAs that align with existing certificate authority infrastructure.
  • Cut costsVault’s PKI and TLS/SSH secrets engines can be private root or intermediate CA, so you can integrate with your existing PKI and save as you scale.
Customer case study

Connecting healthcare in a secure and deliberate way

Learn how Surescripts uses HashiCorp products like Vault and Terraform to centrally secure secrets, manage certificates, and deploy newer versions of apps much faster.
Resources

Get started with these resources

Explore articles, tutorials, and other content to ease collaboration and help teams work faster with Vault.

  • Generate certificates with the PKI secrets engineUse the public key infrastructure (PKI) secrets engine to generate dynamic X.509 certificates without manually creating a private key or submitting to a certificate authority (CA).
  • Enable ACME with PKI secrets engineLearn how to configure the PKI secrets engine to enable ACME, and manage the lifecycle of a Caddy server TLS certificate with Vault.
  • Create and store private keys within HSMsGenerate new PKI key pairs and certificates from external hardware security modules (HSM) or cloud key management systems (KMS) and verify and sign certificate workflows within those environments.