IETF: Automated Certificate Management Environment (acme)

[vanbroup]

Historically, issuance of certificates for Internet applications (e.g., web servers) has involved many manual identity validation steps by the certification authority (CA). The ACME WG will specify conventions for automated X.509 certificate management, including validation of control over an identifier, certificate issuance, certificate renewal, and certificate revocation. The initial focus of the ACME WG will be on domain name certificates (as used by web servers), but other uses of certificates can be considered as work progresses.

ACME certificate management must allow the CA to verify, in an automated manner, that the party requesting a certificate has authority over the requested identifiers, including the subject and subject alternative names. The processing must also confirm that the requesting party has access to the private key that corresponds to the public key that will appear in the certificate. All of the processing must be done in a manner that is compatible with common service deployment environments, such as hosting environments.

ACME certificate management must, in an automated manner, allow an authorized party to request revocation of a certificate.

The ACME working group is specifying ways to automate certificate issuance, validation, revocation and renewal. The ACME working group is not reviewing or producing certificate policies or practices.

https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/acme/about/

[primetomas]

RFC8555 is very much focused on Web certificates. Anyone knows of ACME drafts/extensions that are more focused on IoT scenarios?

[vanbroup]

You might want to have a look at draft-ietf-acme-integrations which talks about integrating ACME with BRSKI (Bootstrapping Remote Secure Key Infrastructures).