PKI security is straining under machine identity growth

At a glance

What this is: This is a CyberArk-commissioned Ponemon study showing that legacy PKI operations are struggling to keep pace with machine and workload identity growth, creating outages, weak cryptography exposure, and low compliance confidence.

Why it matters: It matters because certificate lifecycle failure now affects machine identity governance, operational resilience, and zero-trust programmes at the same time, not as separate problems.

By the numbers:

• 56% have suffered unplanned outages due to expired certificates or configuration errors.
• 60% experienced security exploits as a result of weak cryptography.
• Only 46% of organizations are highly confident that their PKI can meet compliance requirements.

👉 Read CyberArk's report on PKI security trends and certificate management

Context

Public key infrastructure is the control plane for digital trust, but it breaks down when certificate volume, renewal timing, and ownership outgrow manual administration. In machine identity programmes, PKI is no longer a background utility. It becomes a core governance surface for certificates, workloads, and the systems that rely on them.

The article’s central issue is that traditional PKI operating models were built for slower change and fewer identities. That assumption fails in cloud-native and zero-trust environments where machine and workload identities multiply quickly, certificate lifetimes shrink, and the cost of missed renewal or weak cryptography shows up as outage, exploit, or compliance drift.

For IAM, PAM, and lifecycle teams, this is a governance story as much as a cryptography story. The question is whether certificate ownership, renewal, visibility, and exception handling are controlled with the same discipline now expected in broader identity programmes.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams govern certificate lifecycle at machine identity scale?

A: Security teams should centralise certificate ownership, automate renewal and revocation, and maintain a complete inventory of every certificate that supports production services. Governance fails when certificates are treated like ad hoc infrastructure items instead of identities with lifecycle events. The operating model needs auditable controls, clear accountability, and exception handling tied to service risk.

Q: Why do expired certificates still cause outages in mature environments?

A: Expired certificates still cause outages because many environments rely on manual tracking, fragmented ownership, and renewal processes that do not match certificate growth. Mature teams often have policy, but not reliable execution. When the inventory is incomplete or the owner is unclear, the renewal event is missed and the service fails before remediation begins.

Q: What breaks when PKI visibility is incomplete?

A: Incomplete PKI visibility breaks enforcement, auditability, and incident response. Teams cannot prove which certificates exist, where they are deployed, or whether they are still trusted. That creates blind spots for expiry, weak cryptography, and third-party CA risk. Without visibility, compliance claims and resilience planning are both based on partial information.

Q: Who should own PKI risk inside an identity programme?

A: PKI risk should sit jointly with identity governance, infrastructure, and application owners, because certificate failure affects access, availability, and trust. The wrong model is to leave it as a low-level operational task owned only by infrastructure teams. Ownership must be explicit, because certificate lifecycle failures are identity failures with business impact.

Technical breakdown

Why legacy PKI breaks under machine identity scale

PKI issues certificates that bind identity to keys and trust chains, but the operational burden rises sharply when certificates are created, renewed, and revoked at machine speed. Legacy systems often rely on manual inventories, ticket-driven renewals, and fragmented ownership. That model can function with a small, stable certificate estate, but it fails when workloads, services, and devices expand across cloud and zero-trust architectures. The result is not just inefficiency. It is governance blind spots, expired certificates, and inconsistent policy enforcement across the estate.

Practical implication: move certificate governance out of spreadsheets and into an authoritative inventory with clear ownership.

How manual certificate lifecycle work creates outages and exploit paths

Manual renewal and tracking processes create two linked failure modes. First, they increase the chance that a certificate expires before remediation happens, causing service disruption. Second, they delay responses to weak cryptography, third-party CA compromise, or private key theft, which extends the exposure window. In PKI, the lifecycle is the security control. If issuance, renewal, revocation, and replacement are not automated and auditable, the organisation is left reacting after trust has already been broken.

Practical implication: automate certificate lifecycle events end to end, including renewal, revocation, and exception tracking.

Why unified visibility changes PKI governance outcomes

Unified visibility means knowing where certificates are, who owns them, how long they remain valid, and which systems depend on them. That visibility is what lets teams measure exposure and enforce policy consistently. The study shows stronger confidence where certificate inventory is unified, which is a governance signal, not just a tooling preference. Without it, compliance claims remain fragile because teams cannot prove coverage across the full certificate estate or detect drift before it becomes operational.

Practical implication: treat certificate inventory completeness as a governance control, not an administrative metric.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

Legacy PKI has become a machine identity governance problem, not just a certificate operations problem. When certificate demand grows faster than human-led administration, the organisation is no longer managing trust. It is managing backlog, exceptions, and hidden ownership gaps. The practical conclusion is that PKI must be governed as part of machine identity lifecycle control, not left as a separate infrastructure function.

Manual certificate handling creates an outage-first operating model. The study’s outage and weak cryptography findings point to the same failure pattern: renewal, revocation, and replacement are treated as reactive chores instead of controlled lifecycle events. That means trust failure is discovered after impact, not before it. Practitioners should read this as evidence that manual PKI no longer meets the resilience expectations of modern identity programmes.

Unified visibility is now the dividing line between defensible PKI and speculative PKI. Organisations with clearer certificate inventory confidence are also more confident in compliance, which shows that visibility is a control, not a reporting feature. Without a complete view of certificates, policy enforcement becomes partial and audit evidence becomes unreliable. The practical implication is that certificate inventory coverage must be treated as a hard governance requirement.

Certificate lifecycle ownership: This study shows that certificate management was designed for environments where identities were fewer, slower, and easier to assign to a human owner. That assumption fails when machine and workload identities scale faster than ticket queues, because ownership, renewal timing, and exception handling stop being deterministic. The implication is that PKI governance must be restructured around machine identity behaviour, not calendar-driven human operations.

Automation is becoming a control requirement, not an efficiency preference. The report’s confidence gap shows that organisations cannot sustain secure PKI with fragmented tools and manual intervention alone. Automation reduces missed renewal events, but more importantly it creates auditable lifecycle enforcement across a rapidly changing certificate estate. Practitioners should treat automation as part of the trust model itself.

From our research:

• 79% of organisations have experienced secrets leaks, with 77% of these incidents resulting in tangible damage, according to Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, which shows how weak lifecycle discipline still is in many identity programmes.
• For the broader lifecycle context, see NHI Lifecycle Management Guide, which connects provisioning, rotation, visibility, and offboarding.

What this signals

Certificate lifecycle discipline is now part of identity resilience, not just infrastructure hygiene. Teams that treat PKI as a side function will keep discovering renewal failures only after production impact. As certificate estates expand across cloud and workload environments, visibility, owner assignment, and lifecycle automation become core control points for identity programmes.

The practical signal for practitioners is that audit readiness and outage prevention are converging. If the organisation cannot answer where certificates are, who owns them, and how renewal is enforced, the PKI programme is already carrying hidden operational risk. That is a governance gap, not a tooling preference.

For teams building the next phase of machine identity control, the priority is to align PKI operations with Top 10 NHI Issues and the wider machine identity model, because certificate risk is now a visible part of identity risk.

For practitioners

• Build an authoritative certificate inventory Map every internal certificate to an owner, system, expiry date, and renewal path. Include service certificates, application certificates, and third-party CA dependencies so that gaps are visible before they become outages.
• Automate renewal and revocation workflows Remove manual renewal queues for certificates that support production services, and create auditable workflows for revocation, replacement, and exception handling. The control goal is to shorten the time between lifecycle event and enforcement.
• Review weak cryptography exposure paths Identify certificates, keys, and CA dependencies that still rely on outdated algorithms or fragile trust chains. Prioritise systems where weak cryptography would create operational disruption or high-value compromise.
• Tie PKI governance to zero-trust identity control Use certificate lifecycle data as part of your broader identity governance programme so that machine identities, workload access, and trust decisions are aligned. This is where PKI stops being infrastructure maintenance and becomes identity risk management.

Key takeaways

• The study shows that PKI pressure is being driven by machine identity growth, not just by certificate volume.
• Outages, weak cryptography, and low compliance confidence all point to the same issue: manual certificate governance no longer scales.
• Practitioners should treat certificate inventory, renewal automation, and ownership clarity as identity controls with direct business impact.

Key terms

• Public Key Infrastructure: The system used to issue, manage, and revoke digital certificates that bind identities to cryptographic keys. In identity programmes, PKI is the trust layer that allows systems to verify machines, services, and users. When certificate lifecycle management is weak, trust breaks operationally rather than theoretically.
• Certificate Lifecycle Management: The control process for issuing, renewing, rotating, revoking, and retiring certificates across their usable life. In mature identity governance, lifecycle management must be automated, auditable, and tied to ownership, because expiry or revocation failure can interrupt services and extend exposure windows.
• Machine Identity: A non-human identity used by workloads, services, devices, or automated systems to authenticate and establish trust. Machine identities often depend on certificates, keys, and tokens, which means governance must cover inventory, ownership, rotation, and offboarding just as rigorously as human access.

Deepen your knowledge

NHI governance, agentic AI identity, and machine identity security are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are responsible for identity security strategy or NHI governance in your organisation, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by CyberArk: Trends in PKI Security: A Global Study of Trends, Challenges & Business Impact. Read the original.