SC-17 - Public Key Infrastructure Certificates

Control requirements

SC-17 (a)

Issue public key certificates under an [IBM Assignment: organization-defined certificate policy in accordance with the Supplemental Guidance for Cryptography Governance] or obtain public key certificates from an approved service provider.

SC-17 (b)

Include only approved trust anchors in trust stores or certificate stores managed by the organization.

Additional IBM Cloud for Financial Services specifications

The organization must implement certificate management processes including:

Obtaining certificates from a customer-approved service provider / certificate authority
Issued certificates must identify allowed key operations
Certificates must only be used in accordance with key attributes as specified within the certificate
A new key pair must be created, and another certificate obtained when a certificate is becomes invalid

NIST supplemental guidance

Public key infrastructure certificates are certificates with visibility external to organizational systems and certificates related to the internal operations of systems, such as application-specific time services. In cryptographic systems with a hierarchical structure, a trust anchor is an authoritative source (i.e., a certificate authority) for which trust is assumed and not derived. A root certificate for a PKI system is an example of a trust anchor. A trust store or certificate store maintains a list of trusted root certificates.