TL;DR: Digital certificate usage and transaction volumes have risen 30% since 2021, while poor storage, duplicate copies on devices, weak auditing, and lifecycle gaps continue to expose organisations to identity theft, key theft, forgery, and service disruption, according to Vintegris. The governance problem is no longer certificate availability but certificate custody, traceability, and revocation discipline.
At a glance
What this is: This analysis says digital certificate growth is exposing custody, traceability, and lifecycle control gaps that can undermine trust services.
Why it matters: It matters because IAM, PAM, and NHI teams increasingly have to govern certificate custody, revocation, and evidence of use as a security control, not just a compliance task.
By the numbers:
- Since 2021, the number of transactions and digital certificates managed by organizations has increased by 30%.
Context
Digital certificates are cryptographic credentials used to authenticate, sign, and establish trust in electronic transactions. The governance problem in this article is not certificate issuance alone, but what happens after certificates are copied, moved, shared, and renewed across devices and locations.
The source argues that growth in certificate usage has outpaced the operational controls needed to keep custody, traceability, and revocation aligned. That creates a security and compliance gap for organisations that rely on certificates for signing, authentication, and regulated trust services.
This is primarily a machine identity and trust-services issue, with clear implications for NHI governance, certificate lifecycle management, and evidence-based control assurance.
Key questions
Q: What breaks when digital certificates are copied across multiple devices?
A: When certificates are copied across multiple devices, the organisation loses control over which instance is authoritative. Older copies can remain usable after migration, which expands the trust boundary and makes revocation harder to prove. The practical failure is not encryption weakness, but custody drift that turns one identity into several unmanaged ones.
Q: Why do certificate custody failures create regulatory and accountability risk?
A: Because certificates are used for legally meaningful authentication and digital signatures, poor custody weakens traceability and the ability to prove who used the credential and when. That directly affects compliance evidence, dispute resolution, and the organisation's ability to show proactive control.
Q: What are the signs that certificate lifecycle processes are not working properly?
A: Common warning signs include delayed renewals, unnoticed expirations, inconsistent revocation, slow onboarding for new users or devices, and poor visibility into certificate status. If teams rely on spreadsheets or disconnected processes, they often discover problems only after downtime or access failures occur. Those symptoms usually indicate the lifecycle process is too manual to scale safely.
Q: How should organisations govern digital certificates in shared and remote environments?
A: They should treat certificates as controlled credentials, not portable files. That means centralised custody, explicit authorisation for use, evidence of activity, and a reliable process for revocation and deletion when devices or responsibilities change.
Technical breakdown
Why certificate custody becomes the control point
A digital certificate is only as trustworthy as the controls around where it is stored, who can use it, and how its use is recorded. In practice, the risk is not abstract cryptography failure but uncontrolled duplication across devices, local storage on shared endpoints, and poor inventory visibility. Once a certificate exists in multiple places, revocation and accountability become harder because the organisation may no longer know which copy was used, by whom, or in which workflow. That is a custody problem first and a cryptographic problem second.
Practical implication: Treat certificate custody as an access-control and evidence problem, not just a PKI administration task.
How lifecycle gaps expand the attack surface
Certificate lifecycle management covers issuance, renewal, replacement, and revocation. When these steps are handled inconsistently, expired or duplicated certificates persist, and the organisation keeps more trust material alive than it can confidently govern. That widens the attack surface because every stale copy remains a potential signing or authentication path. The article also points to delayed deletion after device migration, which is a classic lifecycle failure: the active certificate may be legitimate, while the abandoned copy becomes an unmanaged security liability.
Practical implication: Map every certificate to an owner, location, and revocation path so stale copies do not outlive their intended use.
Why monitoring and audit evidence matter for trust services
Certificate use can support legally sensitive actions such as electronic signatures and authentication, so traceability is part of the control itself. The article notes that tracking date, time, location, and application of use can require expensive auditing and monitoring, which is why many organisations underinvest until a dispute or incident occurs. Without evidence of use, organisations cannot confidently prove who exercised a certificate, whether use stayed within policy, or whether a certificate was misused after migration or sharing.
Practical implication: Build evidence collection into certificate operations so signing and authentication events are attributable and reviewable.
Threat narrative
Attacker objective: The attacker wants to impersonate the legitimate certificate holder and use trusted signing or authentication to undermine integrity and trust.
- Entry occurs when a certificate is copied to a device, migrated without deleting previous copies, or stored on a shared system with weak access control.
- Escalation follows when an attacker or unauthorised user obtains the private key and can sign or authenticate as the legitimate owner.
- Impact appears as identity theft, signature forgery, document tampering, or service disruption when certificate use can no longer be trusted.
Breaches seen in the wild
- Sisense breach 2024: A credential in Sisense's GitLab reportedly opened S3 buckets of customer tokens, passwords and certificates; CISA urged a full reset.
Read and download The State of NHI & AI Agent Breach Report 2026, covering 200+ breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.
NHI Mgmt Group analysis
Digital certificate sprawl is a custody problem disguised as a scale problem: once certificates are copied across devices and locations, the organisation loses reliable control over where trust material resides. The article shows that issuance growth without deletion discipline creates the real security gap. Practitioners should therefore measure certificate sprawl as an ownership and custody failure, not a volume metric.
Certificate lifecycle governance is now the primary trust control: issuance, renewal, revocation, and post-migration deletion are inseparable. If revocation does not reliably remove the working copy, the control is incomplete even when the formal status has changed. That makes lifecycle traceability the difference between defensible use and unmanaged persistence.
Centralisation changes the governance model, not just the tooling model: the article’s centralised approach only matters because it restores evidence, authorisation, and usage visibility that distributed local storage destroys. The meaningful design question is whether the organisation can prove who used the certificate, where, and for what purpose. Custody evidence is the control boundary.
Trust services should be governed like privileged access, not office productivity files: a certificate that can sign documents or authenticate transactions carries decision power, not just data value. That means certificate handling belongs in the same governance conversation as sensitive credentials, delegated authority, and reviewable access. Organisations that treat certificates as ordinary files will understate their risk exposure.
Digital certificate custody debt: This article exposes a specific failure mode where convenience-driven duplication outpaces control evidence. The implication is that certificate programmes need ownership, location, and revocation proof before scale turns into persistent trust leakage.
From our research library:
- According to the 2023 State of Machine Identity Management report, only 47% of companies have enough staff dedicated to their PKI.
What this signals
Digital certificate custody now sits at the intersection of NHI governance and trust-services assurance: the operational question is no longer whether certificates exist, but whether the organisation can prove each one has a single owner, a single current copy, and a revocation path that actually removes access. That is the governance standard that stops certificate sprawl from becoming silent trust leakage.
Certificate lifecycle evidence is the missing control layer: when signing and authentication credentials move across devices, the organisation needs proof of location, use, and deletion to preserve accountability. Without that evidence, revocation becomes administrative rather than effective, and trust services remain exposed even when policy looks complete.
For practitioners
- Inventory every certificate copy Track certificate owners, storage locations, device associations, and intended use so duplicate copies can be identified and removed.
- Enforce post-migration deletion Require certificate removal from old devices and shared locations whenever a user, workstation, or signing workflow changes.
- Bind certificate use to explicit authorization Restrict which applications, users, and workflows can exercise a certificate, and record each permitted use as evidence.
- Make revocation operationally visible Verify that revocation status is checked wherever certificates are consumed, and that revoked credentials cannot continue to authenticate or sign.
- Add evidence capture to certificate operations Log date, time, location, application, and owner for each certificate use so compliance and incident review can reconstruct activity.
Key takeaways
- Digital certificate sprawl turns trust services into a custody and traceability problem when copies persist across devices and locations.
- The source says managed transactions and certificates have risen by 30% since 2021, which increases the burden on lifecycle and evidence controls.
- Organisations need ownership, deletion, and revocation proof for certificates if they want trust services to remain defensible at scale.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 addresses the attack and risk surface, while NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5, CIS Controls v8 and NIST CSF 2.0 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 — Secret Leakage | Certificate copies on devices and shared storage create exposure similar to secret leakage. |
| NHI-07 — Long-Lived Secrets | Stale certificate copies and slow revocation extend the usable life of trust credentials. | |
| Recommendation — Scan for duplicate certificate copies and remove any unmanaged private key exposure immediately. Shorten certificate validity and enforce revocation checks so long-lived copies cannot persist unnoticed. | ||
| NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 | IA-5 — Authenticator Management | Certificate lifecycle and revocation are authenticator management concerns for non-human credentials. |
| Recommendation — Apply authenticator management controls to track issuance, rotation, revocation, and deletion of certificates. | ||
| CIS Controls v8 | CIS-5 — Account Management | Certificate ownership and removal mirror account lifecycle governance and offboarding discipline. |
| Recommendation — Tie certificate ownership to account management processes so orphaned credentials are revoked and removed. | ||
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AA-05 — Access Permissions, Entitlements and Authorizations | Certificate use depends on controlled authorisation and traceable entitlement boundaries. |
| Recommendation — Map certificate use to entitlement reviews and enforce authorised use only where policy allows it. | ||
Key terms
- Digital Certificate Custody: Digital certificate custody is the controlled handling of certificates so the organisation always knows where they are, who can use them, and which copy is authoritative. For NHIs, custody is a governance control because a certificate can authenticate or sign even when the original owner no longer has operational control.
- Certificate Lifecycle Management: The governance of digital certificates from issuance through renewal and revocation, ensuring certificates are valid, monitored, and rotated before expiry. Expired certificates are a leading cause of outages and unplanned security gaps.
- Trust Service Provider: A Trust Service Provider is an organization that issues, validates, or manages digital trust services used to establish confidence in identities, transactions, or communications. In practice, it may provide certificates, signatures, identity verification, or trust frameworks that support authentication, non-repudiation, and policy enforcement across systems and regulated workflows.
- Identity Traceability: Identity traceability is the ability to link each action back to a specific identity, authorisation path, and time window. It is essential when humans, service accounts, and AI agents all operate in the same environment and auditors need a defensible record.
Deepen your knowledge
NHI governance, identity lifecycle management, and secrets management are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building or maturing an IAM programme, it is worth exploring.
Published by the NHIMG editorial team on July 10, 2026.
Updated on October 11, 2026.
NHI Mgmt Group, the independent authority on Non-Human Identity, IAM, and Agentic AI security. nhimg.org