November 14, 2026 · 5 min read – What Is SCEP? How Devices Request Certificates AutomaticallyWhat Is SCEP? How Devices Request Certificates Automatically
What Is SCEP? How Devices Request Certificates Automatically
A company with 3,000 laptops, 500 printers and 200 routers cannot request every certificate by hand. To solve that problem, Cisco and VeriSign created the Simple Certificate Enrollment Protocol, or SCEP, around the year 2000. It lets devices request their own certificate ... Continue Reading →
What Are Post-Quantum Certificates? ML-DSA and the Road to 2035
Almost every certificate on the internet today relies on RSA or elliptic curves. A large enough quantum computer could break both, and with them the signatures that certificates depend on. That is why the US standards body NIST standardised new, quantum-safe signature ... Continue Reading →
PKI vs Web of Trust vs TOFU: Trust Models Explained
With a public key, anyone can send you encrypted messages or check your signatures. But how do you know a key really belongs to you and not to an attacker pretending to be you? There are three fundamentally different answers: the hierarchical PKI with certificate ... Continue Reading →
How to Manage Certificates and Avoid Expiry Outages
An expired certificate is one of the most mundane and yet most common causes of IT outages. The server is running, the network works, and still nobody can connect, because a date has passed. As certificate lifetimes shrink, managing certificates becomes a permanent ... Continue Reading →
What Is Certificate Pinning? HPKP and Pinning in Apps
Normally a browser accepts any valid certificate that leads to a trusted root, whichever of the many certificate authorities issued it. Certificate pinning narrows that down: a program accepts only a specific certificate or key for a particular server. That protects ... Continue Reading →
What Is S/MIME? Signed and Encrypted Email Explained
An ordinary email is like a postcard: the sender can be faked, and every server along the way can read it. S/MIME changes that with certificates. A signed email proves who sent it and that it arrived unchanged; an encrypted email can only be read by the recipient. ... Continue Reading →
How Code Signing Works: Signed Software Explained
When you download and run a program, your operating system quietly checks who made it and whether it has been changed since. That is possible thanks to code signing: software makers sign their programs digitally with a key that belongs to a certificate. This guide ... Continue Reading →
What Is an HSM? Hardware Security Modules and TPMs Explained
A certificate is only as secure as the private key behind it. If that key sits in a file on a server, anyone who takes over the server can copy it, and nobody will notice the copy. That is why valuable keys belong in hardware they cannot leave: in a hardware security ... Continue Reading →
How to Run a Private Certificate Authority
For public websites, a certificate authority such as Let’s Encrypt is the right choice. But many certificates are never checked by strangers’ browsers at all: servers on a company network, devices, VPN gateways, client certificates or services in Kubernetes. ... Continue Reading →
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