PKI, SSL/TLS and Digital Certificate Management
3 days|Published programme
This course takes technical officers from the mathematics of public key cryptography through to running a certificate estate in production. Participants work with real tooling throughout: generating key pairs and certificate signing requests, reading and validating X.509 fields, building and troubleshooting certificate chains, configuring SSL/TLS on a live service, and handling issuance, installation, renewal and revocation. The programme covers how Certificate Authorities establish trust, why chains fail in practice, and how to plan a certificate lifecycle so that an expiry never takes a public service down. Delivered instructor-led in a classroom with hands-on exercises using OpenSSL, and adapted to the commercial CA platform the organisation already uses where that is relevant. Designed for IT officers, system and network administrators, security practitioners and the engineers who carry responsibility for an organisation's certificates.
What delegates leave able to do
- Generate keys and certificate signing requests, and read an X.509 certificate field by field.
- Configure and verify SSL/TLS on a service, and diagnose why a chain or hostname fails to validate.
- Run a certificate lifecycle end to end, so that renewals are planned rather than discovered when something breaks.
What the course covers
- Public key infrastructure and cryptography fundamentals
- Public and private keys, hashing and digital signatures
- Certificate Authorities, trust stores and certificate chains
- X.509 certificate structure, fields and extensions
- Certificate Signing Requests and CSR generation
- SSL/TLS handshakes, cipher suites and HTTPS in practice
- Issuance, installation, renewal and revocation
- Certificate lifecycle management, inventory and expiry monitoring
- Hands-on exercises with OpenSSL
- Working with commercial CA management platforms
- Diagnosing chain, hostname and expiry failures
Running soon, if you need a date
This programme runs on request. These are scheduled now and open for registration.
Who should attend
- IT officers and systems administrators
- Network and infrastructure engineers
- Information security practitioners
- Application and web server administrators
- Technical staff responsible for certificate renewals
