Manage AWS Private Certificate Authority | Certificate Details and Expiration Dates
Question
You work in a large organization as an AWS engineer.
You create a private Certificate Authority in ACM which is used by multiple teams.
The certificates issued from the private CA are for different entities such as web servers, VPN users and internal API endpoints.
You need to quickly manage these certificates and get the details including the ARN, subject name and expiration date.
Which of the below options is the easiest one?
Answers
Explanations
Click on the arrows to vote for the correct answer
A. B. C. D.Correct Answer - D.
Users can create an audit report for a private CA.
The report is saved in an S3 bucket and contains the required information.
The reference is in.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/acm-pca/latest/userguide/PcaAuditReport.html.Option A is incorrect: Because there is no list-certificates CLI for acm-pca.
Check https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/acm-pca/index.html#cli-aws-acm-pca.
Option B is incorrect: Because there is no IAM permission for list-certificates.
And you cannot easily get all the certificate details from the AWS console.
Option C is incorrect: This option may work.
However, it is not as straightforward as option.
D.
You have to maintain the Python script and use AWS SDK.
Option D is CORRECT: The audit report is the easiest way.
The report contains the required details of CA issued or revoked certificates.
Take the below as an example:
{
"awsAccountId": "123456789012",
"certificateArn": "arn:aws:acm-pca:region:account:certificate-authority/CA_ID/certificate/e8cbd2bedb122329f97706bcfec990f8",
"serial": "e8:cb:d2:be:db:12:23:29:f9:77:06:bc:fe:c9:90:f8",
"subject": "1.2.840.113549.1.9.1=#161173616c6573406578616d706c652e636f6d,CN=www.example1.com,OU=Sales,O=Example Company,L=Seattle,ST=Washington,C=US",
"notBefore": "2018-02-26T18:39:57+0000",
"notAfter": "2019-02-26T19:39:57+0000",
"issuedAt": "2018-02-26T19:39:58+0000",
"revokedAt": "2018-02-26T20:00:36+0000",
"revocationReason": "KEY_COMPROMISE"
}
The easiest option to manage the certificates issued by a private Certificate Authority in ACM and retrieve details such as ARN, subject name, and expiration date is option B, which is to use the AWS ACM console.
Option A involves creating a shell script to use the AWS CLI acm-pca list-certificates command to get the required certificate information for this particular private CA. This requires knowledge of shell scripting and the AWS CLI, which may not be available to all team members. Additionally, parsing the output of the command to extract the required information may require additional scripting, making this option more complex and time-consuming than option B.
Option C involves editing a Python script to use Boto3 to retrieve the certificate details, including subject name, expiration date, etc. This option is more flexible than option A since it allows more control over the information retrieved and how it is presented. However, this option requires knowledge of Python and Boto3, making it less accessible to team members who do not have these skills.
Option D involves creating an audit report to list all of the certificates that the private CA has issued or revoked and downloading the JSON-formatted report from the S3 bucket. While this option provides a comprehensive overview of all certificates issued by the private CA, it may not be the easiest option for quickly retrieving specific details about individual certificates.
Option B, which involves using the AWS ACM console to get the certificates' details for each private Certificate Authority, is the easiest option. This option is accessible to all team members who have the necessary permissions to access the AWS ACM console. Additionally, the ACM console provides an intuitive interface for quickly retrieving specific details about individual certificates, such as ARN, subject name, and expiration date.
