Recently Awarded Patent Demonstrates Venafi's Industry-Leading R&D and Innovation in Growing EKCM Market

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Recently Awarded Patent Demonstrates Venafi's Industry-Leading R&D and Innovation in Growing EKCM Market

Salt Lake City, UT

September 8, 2011

Patent Covers the Management of SSL Certificates across Multiple Certificate Authorities Simultaneously—Delivering Improved Security, Operational Efficiency and Disaster Recovery for Enterprise Organizations

Venafi, the inventor and market leader of enterprise key and certificate management (EKCM) solutions, today announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued a patent covering the company's intellectual property for managing the enrollment and provisioning of digital certificates from multiple certificate authorities (CAs) through a common interface. The patented technology supports a crucial component in the Venafi Encryption Director™ 6 (Director 6) platform, which provides out–of–the box discovery, monitoring, validation, management and provisioning capabilities for the widest range of digital certificate and encryption key technologies.

Venafi developed the Director 6 platform and applied for the patent after recognizing that organizations have little insight into the security assets in their inventories, where they are deployed, by whom they are accessed or how they are managed. Without leveraging best practices and automated management processes across multiple CAs, companies and government agencies cannot gain control of their spiraling key and certificate inventories. Thus they expose themselves to significant, unquantified and unmanaged security, compliance and operational risks, which invariably lead to unauthorized access, unexpected system outages and high-profile compromises—all with increasing frequency and costs.

“As the market leader and pioneer, Venafi has amassed unique expertise in helping customers solve a critical security management problem. This latest patent, which demonstrates our thought leadership and expertise at the forefront of the EKCM market, represents another significant milestone in our growing patent inventory,” said Jeff Hudson, Venafi CEO. “The reality is that SSL certificates can turn into liabilities if managed improperly. An expired certificate can shut down critical systems, just as a breached certificate authority can bring an organization to its knees. The most recent DigiNotar CA breach makes the risks of poor certificate management and the need for disaster recovery plans explicit. This patent and the original research it protects represents our ongoing efforts to help organizations reduce their risk exposure.”

Patent Details: # 7,937,583

The patent for a “method of aggregating multiple certificate authority services” underpins effective and comprehensive solutions for managing public key infrastructure (PKI) certificates across an enterprise environment, which typically includes thousands or tens of thousands of digital certificates from multiple CAs. The technology powers the automation of several components of SSL certificate lifecycle management, enabling organizations to implement best security practices. These best practices include effective access controls, rigid separation of duties between administrators and encryption keys, as well as CA compromise disaster recovery plans. In addition, Venafi’s single renewal portal for multiple CAs provides easy–to–deploy interoperability, scalability and orchestration across multiple encryption types, operating environments, CAs, HSMs, applications, directories and other enterprise systems.

Director 6 provides automated management capabilities for the widest range of digital certificate and encryption key technologies used by today's enterprises and governments including symmetric keys, SSH keys, asymmetric keys and digital certificates—across global infrastructures, behind the firewall and in the cloud. For more details on the patent and Venafi products, please visit www.venafi.com.

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