As TLS certificate validity periods are shortened to 47 days, a fundamental shift in how certificate lifecycles are managed is required. What is the most effective way to respond to this change? Here we introduce how HashiCorp Vault can mitigate certificate-related risks and accelerate adoption.
☑️ The Mandatory 47-Day TLS Certificate Validity Period
On April 11, 2025, the CA/Browser Forum formally adopted a ballot amending the TLS Baseline Requirements. This amendment sets a schedule for shortening the validity period of TLS certificates and the reusability of CA validation information within certificates. The new ballot aims to reduce certificate validity periods to 47 days by March 15, 2029.
This change is not just an infrastructure issue that can be left to the security team. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how products and services operate within the enterprise IT environment to ensure operational uptime, availability, and security. Shorter certificate validity periods mean that customers must prioritize certificate lifecycle automation as a core security principle. Accelerated certificate expiration primarily burdens organizations that use manual processes for certificate issuance. In other words, without automating certificate lifecycle management processes, this is a difficult challenge, but HashiCorp Vault can help.
☑️ Major Service Outages Caused by Poor Certificate Management
Without sufficient investment in certificate lifecycle automation, customers are exposed to higher risk, and incidents like the examples below can occur:
☑️ Signs of Poor Management
Based on the cases above and many other certificate-related outages, signs of poor certificate management include the following.
☑️ Automated Management with HashiCorp Vault
To solve these problems that come with managing shorter certificate validity periods, HashiCorp Vault provides a powerful, streamlined way to automate the entire process based on a strong authentication model, reducing the risk of service outages and manual errors.
Vault removes the complexity of certificate management by centralizing the process and automating the entire certificate lifecycle (generation, renewal, and revocation). It does all of this while ensuring appropriate security and operational scale. This reduces manual work for teams and minimizes risk.
At first glance, the 47-day certificate lifecycle requirement may seem like a daunting challenge for large enterprises. However, by adopting Vault PKI and leveraging its strong authentication model, certificate automation capabilities, and experience being used at scale by some of the world's largest organizations, enterprises can easily meet this new challenge and gain new confidence. Please refer to the video below for Vault's PKI story.
▶ HashiCorp Vault : Learn More
HashiCorp Vault is an identity-based secrets and encryption management system that securely manages sensitive information based on authentication and authorization. It allows sensitive information such as tokens, API keys, passwords, encryption keys, and certificates to be managed consistently through a unified interface, and strengthens security with access control and audit logging capabilities. Secrets tend to be managed in a scattered way across platforms, it is difficult to know who is accessing which information, and it is not easy to implement capabilities such as key rotation, secure storage, and detailed logging on your own. To solve these problems, Vault allows access to sensitive data only after verifying and authorizing clients such as users, applications, and systems.
Through its dedicated team, CloudNetworks provides implementation and technical support services for the HashiCorp product portfolio, including Vault and Terraform. For inquiries about HashiCorp, please contact CloudNetworks, an official partner.
