Local Certificate Authority for Secure Service Communication

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Solution Overview

Problem

The existing methods for establishing secure communications, such as those needed for web banking applications in development, staging, and testing environments, face challenges due to the high cost and time-consuming process of obtaining digital certificates from traditional third-party certificate authorities, and self-signed certificates are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.

Innovation Solution

A local certificate authority with temporary signing authority is created on the same computing machine as the service, allowing for the automatic and timely generation of a digital certificate using a temporary CA that resides locally, thereby preventing malicious access and reducing the risk of man-in-the-middle attacks.

Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles

VSEngineering Contradiction Analysis

1Reliability

If a digital certificate is obtained from a traditional third-party certificate authority, then the security and trustworthiness of the communication is improved, but the cost and time required increases significantly

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvesecurity trustworthinessVSAvoidtime to obtain certificate

Core Design Contradiction:

ReliabilityVSLoss of time

Solution Approach 1:

The patent introduces a local certificate authority as an intermediary that operates within the development environment. This local CA acts as a mediator between services needing certificates and the trust verification process, eliminating the need to contact external CAs and thereby reducing time delays while maintaining certificate validity through local trust anchoring

Inventive Principle:

Principle #24Intermediary (Mediator)

Solution Approach 2:

The patent segments the certificate authority function from the traditional centralized model into a distributed local CA that operates independently within each development environment. This segmentation allows each environment to generate and manage its own certificates locally, eliminating the time-consuming process of obtaining certificates from external authorities while maintaining security through proper cryptographic practices

Inventive Principle:

Principle #1Segmentation

2Reliability

If a digital certificate is obtained from a traditional third-party certificate authority, then the security and trustworthiness of the communication is improved, but the cost increases significantly

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvesecurity trustworthinessVSAvoidcost to obtain certificate

Core Design Contradiction:

ReliabilityVSLoss of energy

Solution Approach 1:

The patent implements self-service by enabling development environments to generate and manage their own certificates through a local certificate authority. Services can obtain certificates autonomously without paying external CA fees, as the local CA uses self-generated cryptographic key pairs to issue valid certificates that are trusted within the development ecosystem

Inventive Principle:

Principle #25Self-service

Solution Approach 2:

The patent employs disposable short-lived certificates generated by the local CA for development purposes. These certificates have limited validity periods and are replaced regularly, eliminating the need for expensive long-term certificates from traditional CAs while maintaining adequate security for development and testing environments where certificates don't need to persist indefinitely

Inventive Principle:

Principle #27Cheap short-living objects (Disposable)

3Loss of time

If self-signed certificates are used, then the cost and time are reduced, but the system becomes vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks

Engineering Contradiction:

Improvetime to obtain certificateVSAvoidvulnerability to man-in-the-middle attacks

Core Design Contradiction:

Loss of timeVSObject-affected harmful factors

Solution Approach 1:

The patent introduces a local certificate authority as a trusted intermediary that signs certificates for services in the development environment. This intermediary provides the necessary trust anchoring that self-signed certificates lack, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks by enabling clients to verify certificate authenticity through the local CA's digital signature, while certificates remain valid within the controlled development ecosystem

Inventive Principle:

Principle #24Intermediary (Mediator)

Data Source

PatentUS10103894B2Creating a digital certificate for a service using a local certificate authority

Publication Date: 2018.10.16 RED HAT INC

AI summary

A computing machine creates a local certificate authority (CA) that has certificate signing authority, creates a certificate signing request (CSR) that includes data of a local service that is hosted by the computing machine, creates a service certificate for the local service using at least a portion of the data in the CSR, signs the service certificate using a private key of the local CA, and provides the service certificate to the local service. The private key is stored locally on the computing machine.