PKI - Certification Authority: IssuingCA Best Practice

Question

Good evening everyone,

I would need to know if there is a Best Practice regarding the number of certificates that an Issuing CA should sign and the size of its internal database.

I have an Issuing CA that enrolls certificates for Users, Computers and Mobile Devices, the database exceeds 40GB and I need to understand whether to review my Issuing CA to give less impact to the resources and in case of Recovery.

Kind regards and thanks in Advance,

Alessio.

Answer 1

Thank you @49885604 for your articles and reply.

Let's say that a 40-50GB database would certainly have impacts on the disk space of the IssuingCA, also causing impacts in terms of resources to the machine. In case of virtual machine we could increase disk size, memory and virtual CPU.

In the event of a database disaster and restore, it may take a long time to import 50GB of database into a new IssuingCA. Correct?

What about the possibility of splitting the enrollment of certificates across multiple IssuingCAs? By defining which specific templates do enrollment from one IssuingCA while others from another server!
Is there a specific best practice about that? Related also to the database increasing!

Kind regards,

Alessio.

Answer 2

Hello 49885604,

Thank you for posting in Q&A forum.

the number of certificates that an Issuing CA should sign
A: After my research, it seems the certificate number that an issuing CA issued is very big.

Similar thread for your reference:

https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/202686/maximum-number-of-certificates-generated-by-a-ca#:~:text=What%20is%20the%20maximum%20number%20of%20certificates%20that,be%20unique%20for%20each%20issuer%20%2F%20serial%20pair.

the size of its internal database.
A: For the size of one CA database, you can read link below.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/ask-the-directory-services-team/the-case-of-the-enormous-ca-database/ba-p/398226

I hope the information above is helpful.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to let us know.

Best Regards,

Daisy Zhou

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