Certificate Authority

Google Certificate Authority Service (CA Service) is a highly available, scalable managed service that simplifies and automates certificate management. It allows you to deploy and manage private certificate authorities (CAs) for issuing X.509 certificates for internal infrastructure.

Key Features:

1. Managed PKI - Deploy and operate a private Public Key Infrastructure without managing hardware or software.

2. CA hierarchy - Create root CAs and subordinate CAs organized in a hierarchy.

3. Certificate templates - Define reusable templates for specific certificate types (server, client, code signing).

4. Cloud KMS integration - CA private keys stored and protected in Cloud KMS or Cloud HSM.

5. Workload Identity Federation - Issue certificates for workloads across GKE, Compute Engine, and hybrid environments.

The below example shows how to create a CA pool, a root CA, and issue a certificate using gcloud.

It gives the following output,

CA Pool created: my-ca-pool
Root CA created: my-root-ca (ENABLED)
Subordinate CA created: my-sub-ca (ENABLED)

Certificate issued: my-server-cert
  Subject: CN=api.mycompany.com
  DNS SANs: api.mycompany.com
  Valid from: 2024-01-15 to 2025-01-15
  Issuer: CN=My Subordinate CA
  Key written to: server-key.pem
  Certificate written to: server-cert.pem

CA Service Use Cases:

mTLS for microservices - Issue client and server certificates for mutual TLS authentication between services in a service mesh.

Internal HTTPS - Issue server certificates for internal web services without relying on public CAs.

Code signing - Issue code signing certificates for internal software and container images.