Monday, April 29, 2019

EJBCA 7.1.0 - Partitioned CRLs!

Spring has finally arrived in Stockholm, following the traditional seasons of Winter, False Spring, Second Winter, the Spring of Deceit and the final cold snap of I-Just-Changed-My-Tires. The melting snows bring with them many gifts, besides the beer forgotten on the balcony last November, among them EJBCA 7.1

Partitioned CRLs

Long and enduringly requested, EJBCA 7.1 is now capable of producing partitioned CRLs. Activated under the CA configuration, the number of partitions per CRL is dynamically configurable, allowing new partitions to be added as the CRL grows, and assignment to older partitions to be suspended in order to allow for future growth. CDP partition assignment is random in order to allow for even distribution of certificates, and partition definition can be looked up in the CDP extension as defined in RFC5280.
For those of you not wishing to use partitioned CRLs life will mostly move on as usual while for those of you applying partitioned CRLs to existing installations you will retain a legacy CRL for pre-existing certificates (as the CDP can't be changed retroactively) while newly issued certificates will be issued to partitions.

Deprecation and Removal of Hard Token Support

In an effort to relieve ourselves of maintaining little-used features we have chosen in this release to deprecate and remove support of hard tokens, after analyzing that it has little to no use among PrimeKey customers. Naturally this will have no impact on existing installations, but we have provided scripts for those of you wishing to remove the relevant tables from the database. See the upgrade notes for more details.

VA and RA Specific Distributions

As a response to market interest, we've enhanced our build process and modularization in order to produce VA and RA specific builds of EJBCA, each capable of acting in their specific roles but not as a CA. This allows PrimeKey to offer a more dynamic model for Appliance and Cloud users who would like to add RA and VA instances to their PKIs but find it prohibitive to pay for the full fee for the complete distribution. The standard CA distribution still retains the full VA and RA capabilities as before. If you're interested in finding out more, please contact sales@primekey.com

EJBCA 6.15.2 CE Available on Docker Hub

As some of you already know, as part of our ongoing containerization project we've added a docker container to Docker Hub, built on a sneak-peek of the coming release of EJBCA 6.15.2 Community Edition. 
If you're interested in moving your PKI towards containerization, please go ahead and have a look, and feel free to give us any feedback! 

Cheers,
Mike Agrenius Kushner
Product Owner, EJBCA