Configure certificate auto-rotation

An Azure Key Vault provides the capability for you to easily provision, manage, and deploy your digital certificates. In this blog, you can update your certificate’s validity period, auto-rotation frequency, email notification contacts and CA attributes.

The certificates can be public or private SSL / TLS certificates which may be:

A self-signed certificate,
A certificate created with a non-partern CA with Key Vault,

A certificate created with a partner CA with Key Vault,

A Key Vault can request and renew / auto-rotate certificates through established CA partners such as DigiCert and GlobalSign, providing a robust solution for certificate lifecycle management. This auto-rotation capability is not applicable for certificates created with non-partner CAs.

Partner certificate authority (CA)
The following CAs are currently partnered providers with Key Vault:
DigiCert: Key Vault offers OV or EV TLS/SSL certificates.
GlobalSign: Key Vault offers OV or EV TLS/SSL certificates.

Auto-rotation

Auto-rotation can be configured on your certificate’s lifecycle attributes at the same time while you create your certificate or at a later stage.

Updating certificate lifecycle attributes while creating a new certificate

Go to Key Vault > Certificates

Select Generate/Import

Create a certificate screen, update the following values:

Validity Period: Update the value (in months).

Lifetime Action Type (Select the certificate’s auto-renewal and alerting action and then update percentage lifetime or Number of days before expiry. By default, a certificate’s auto-renewal is set at 80 percent of its lifetime)

Create

Updating certificate  lifecycle attributes on an existing stored certificate

Go to Key Vault > Certificates

Select the certificate you want to update > Select Issuance Policy

On the Issuance Policy screen, update the following values:

Validity Period: Update the value (in months).

Lifetime Action Type:

Select the certificate’s auto-renewal and alerting action – based on either percentage or defined by days

(Changing the Lifetime Action Type for a certificate will record modifications for the existing certificates immediately.)

 

Update the percentage lifetime or Number of days before expiry > Save

If you choose to configure a Azure Key Vault Certificate Policy then you may either click on  Advanced Policy Configuration link or configure the policy via powershell as per below.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/az.keyvault/set-azkeyvaultcertificatepolicy?view=azps-10.4.0#syntax

Adding new certificate contacts

If you want to add a contact to the specified vault to receive notifications of certificate operations.

Get a full list of contacts for your key vault:

az keyvault certificate contact list --vault-name "vaultname"
az keyvault certificate contact add --email youremail@domain.com --vault-name "allen-kv1" --name "Allen Visser" --phone "+2782 000 000"

Verify the full list of contacts added to your key vault:

–I hope this blog made your life easier with regards to updating your certificate’s validity period, auto-rotation frequency, configuring email notification contact and CA attributes.—

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