SECURE PROVISIONING OF UNIQUE TIME-LIMITED CERTIFICATES TO VIRTUAL APPLICATION INSTANCES IN DYNAMIC AND ELASTIC SYSTEMS

摘要

A method is provided for automatically provisioning unique X.509 Certificates and Private Keys into Application Instances in a dynamic and elastic cloud environment. The method provides a means of creating a secure identity to be used for secure communications and resource allocation. Security of the provisioning is guaranteed by the fact that a trusted and hardened Orchestrator is launching the application instance and then directly provisioning the certificate and key. As an additional security measure, the certificates will have a limited time of validity, in order to decrease the impact of an incorrectly-issued certificate.