Entrust Provides Answer to Deprecation of Non-FQDN SSL Certificates

DALLAS, Feb. 12, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The use of non-fully qualified domain names (FQDN) in publically trusted certificates is being deprecated by November 1, 2015, and existing certificates containing non-FQDNs will be revoked by all public certification authorities by October 1, 2016. To help simplify this change, Entrust, Inc. introduces Private SSL Certificates that provide organizations an easy and affordable method for the continued use of non-registered domain names.

"While this is an important change to help strengthen the CA trust infrastructure, Entrust strongly believes there should be simple means for organizations to properly adapt to the new policies," said David Rockvam, Entrust Senior Vice President of Product Management and SaaS Offerings. "This new type of internal SSL certificate helps ensure security is not compromised and wholesale changes aren't required within the organization."

Per the CA/Browser Forum's latest Baseline Requirements, publicly trusted SSL certificates that use non-registered domains represent security vulnerabilities in the SSL trust chain. As a convenience for users, many servers in corporate networks are reachable by local names such as "mail," "wiki" or "hr." Most publicly trusted certificates for non-unique names are deployed in the context of local networks to enable trust in these local names without the additional cost of provisioning a new trust root to clients.

This may be especially desirable for networks lacking centralized policy deployment and management tools, such as "Bring Your Own Device" environments. Unfortunately, even these legitimate deployments come with hidden dangers, and such certificates are frequently misused.

To combat this vulnerability, Entrust Private SSL Certificates provide the same key sizes, signing algorithms, validity periods and CA protection as Entrust's proven publicly trusted SSL certificates — all issued via a private shared CA that ensures no two names are alike.

As an alternative, an organization also may elect to switch all internal SSL certificates to FQDNs and continue to use publically trusted SSL certificates. Root certificate trust is automatically delivered by the operating system or the browser without the organization's IT involvement. Properly changing domain names, however, could take an extended period of time — or even break integrations — as they may be hard-coded into existing applications.

To help organizations understand the changes, Entrust offers a complimentary white paper, "Guidance on Non-FQDNs: The Deprecation of Internal Server Names and Reserved IP Addresses," which explains the policy modifications, why it was implemented and recommendations for possible options moving forward under the new requirements.

Entrust Certificate Services provide organizations with SSL and specialty digital certificates that are proven, cost-effective and supported by standards-based technology. Entrust's public root is ubiquitous on more than 99.9 percent of desktop and mobile browsers.

To learn more about Entrust Private SSL Certificates, visit entrust.com/PrivateSSL.

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About Entrust
A trusted provider of identity-based security solutions, Entrust secures governments, enterprises and financial institutions in more than 5,000 organizations spanning 85 countries. Entrust's award-winning software authentication platforms manage today's most secure identity credentials, addressing customer pain points for cloud and mobile security, physical and logical access, citizen eID initiatives, certificate management and SSL. For more information about Entrust products and services, call 888-690-2424, email [email protected] or visit www.entrust.com.

Entrust is a registered trademark of Entrust, Inc. in the United States and certain other countries. In Canada, Entrust is a registered trademark of Entrust Limited. All Entrust product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Entrust, Inc. or Entrust Limited. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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SOURCE Entrust, Inc.