HID Global, a globally renowned company in trusted identity solutions, has announced that its Public Key Infrastructure-as-a-service (PKIaaS) platform now supports the widely adopted Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol.
ACME protocol
The industry-standard ACME protocol is purpose built to bring single-command simplicity to the previously manual job of managing digital certificates for creating secure web connections.
HID Global was an early supporter of the ACME Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard and, as the original cross signature for the protocol’s first digital certificates, helped fuel its adoption, along with the hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) websites that ACME enables.
HID Account Certificate Manager (ACM) platform
HID has added momentum to a 100% secure web, through the PKIaaS connector model it uses with its HID Account Certificate Manager (ACM) platform. It eliminates the cost, complexity, and risks of using intermediary command and control management platforms to install ACME and other automated certificate utilities.
HID supports the most recent ACME protocol (ACMEv2), released in March 2018 and enables users to control which processes are automated. Organisations can easily add ACME and other commercial certificate utilities to the HID ACM platform, which supports the industry’s broadest range of certificate automation requirements.
HID PKIaaS cloud-based platform
Cloud-based HID PKIaaS platform brings trust to the enterprise and its computers, network devices, IoT systems
The cloud-based HID PKIaaS platform brings trust to the enterprise and its computers, network devices, IoT systems and e-commerce transactions. It is unique in supporting privately issued and trusted SSL/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificates and hosted private Intermediate Certificate Authorities (ICAs) while delivering the industry’s broadest range of certificate automation capabilities under one annual subscription fee.
In use since 2016 and an IETF standard since 2019, ACME is a communications protocol for automating digital certificate lifecycle events between certificate authorities and their users' web servers, simplifying deployment and reducing the cost of using PKI to connect browsers and apps to HTTPS websites. The Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) widely adopted ACME for its Let's Encrypt service.
HID’s IdenTrust CA
Through its partnership with ISRG, HID’s IdenTrust CA, which is used with 53.4 percent of websites, provided the original cross-signature for the majority of digital certificates managed via ACME. In its 2020 annual report, ISRG stated that HTTPS global page loads have grown from 25% in 2013 to 84% currently, and nearly 92% in the United States, which in part is due to automation and scalability benefits of ACME.
And, according to Google’s Transparency Report on HTTPS encryption on the web, desktop Chrome users load more than half of their viewed pages over HTTPS and spend two-thirds of their time on HTTPS pages.