AppViewX Certificate Lifecycle Automation with HashiCorp Vault and RabbitMQ Notification

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AppViewX — Certificate Lifecycle and ADC Management

4 min readOct 25, 2023

In this blog, we’re going to show you how AppViewX CERT+, an automated certificate lifecycle management solution, works with HashCorp Vault and RabbitMQ Notification.

HashiCorp Vault is a tool for securely storing and managing sensitive data such as passwords, tokens, and encryption keys. It provides a central location for storing and managing secrets and can be integrated with other systems and tools to automatically retrieve and use these secrets in a secure manner. This allows organizations to manage and rotate secrets without having to update them in every application or service that uses them, helping to reduce the risk of secrets being compromised.

RabbitMQ is the most popular open-source and cross-platform message broker. RabbitMQ provides a way to exchange the data between different applications, such as a message sent from .Net applications that can be read by a Node.js or Java application

Integration with AppViewX CERT+ Solves Certificate Management Challenges

Certificate expirations, renewals and revocations can be complex tasks for admins who manage certificates. Here is where AppViewX CERT+ can help certificate lifecycle management challenges. AppViewX CERT+ automates certificate discovery across hybrid multi-cloud environments, builds a comprehensive certificate inventory giving you visibility and complete control to efficiently manage certificate expirations, renewals and revocation to eliminate outages and prevent security breaches.

For organizations of all types and sizes, certificate management is critical for ensuring trust, enabling encryption and providing secure access to connected devices, applications and services. . Maintaining certificates is one of the most important aspects of this task, and failure to do so can create a range of technical, security and business risks. One of the biggest challenges is dealing with certificate expirations and renewal to ensure the new certificate is pushed to the correct profile. If not executed properly, this can leave open issues and provide backdoor entry points, which significantly increases the complexity of the certificate configuration.

AppViewX understands the importance of maintaining a clean and efficient certificate lifecycle management process. This is why we’ve developed a master orchestration solution with CERT+ that streamlines the process, allowing you to collate all necessary information and direct multiple systems to execute an arbitrary set of tasks with ease. With our CERT+ solution, you can reduce the technical, security and business risks associated with certificate lifecycle management, streamline the auditing process, and ensure that your processes operate at peak efficiency.

So, whether you’re an IT professional looking to automate your certificate lifecycle management process or simply interested in learning more about the technical aspects of managing certificates, we’ve got you covered. Let’s dive in together and explore how AppView CERT+, HashiCorp Vault and RabbitMQ Notification work together to help you.

How can AppViewX help?

AppViewX CERT+ manages certificates in its inventory to handle the expiry, renewal and revoke issues with notifications from Slack/RabbitMq Notification and the respective private key uploaded and securely stored in the HashiCorp Vault

What goes on behind the scenes?

The Visual Workflow (VW) is triggered on demand.
Based on the user input in the VW form, AppViewX CERT+ checks the certificates which are going to expire on “n” number of days
VW sends the approval notifications via slack channel to get the renewal approval
As per the user change window, renewal can be approved by clicking on the wait for [30 days before expiry], wait for [1 day before expiry], Today[60 days before expiry] buttons.
Based on the user’s approval, appropriate actions are triggered.
CSR is generated using the CSR parameters of the parent certificate and it is submitted to a Certificate Authority, such as DigiCert, Entrust, Sectigo, GlobalSign or others
Then the respective renewed certificate will be fetched to inventory.
The respective key will be uploaded to the HashiCorp Vault [Key/Value section] and the certificate is uploaded to the JIRA ID.
The private key deletion from the AppViewX CERT+ inventory is handled in the VW.
Once the certificate has been renewed, a message will be sent to the connection management service via RabbitMQ stating that the certificate is available.
Then, the Connection Management service will fetch the renewed certificates from AppViewX CERT+ via an API call.
Then, the user can download the certificate from the VW.
On successful installation process, a Slack and email notification is sent to the pre-defined dl email ID and Slack channel stating that the ‘certificate renewal process is successful’, along with the following details and VW will close the respective Jira ID.

o Certificate common name

o Serial number

o Device name

o Virtual server

In case of any error in the renewal process, a Slack and email notification is sent to the pre-defined dl email ID and slack channel stating that the ‘certificate renewal process has failed’, along with the following details and VW will close the respective Jira ID.