# AWS Private Certificate Authority Cloud service · AWS. Updated 2026-11-12. Page: https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-private-certificate-authority > AWS Private Certificate Authority (AWS PCA) is a managed private CA service that allows organizations to easily and securely manage the lifecycle of their private certificates without the upfront investment and ongoing maintenance costs of operating their own certificate authority. Practice exams covering AWS Private Certificate Authority: [ANS-C01 AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty](https://blowstack.com/practice-exams/aws-certified-advanced-networking-specialty), [DVA-C02 AWS Certified Developer - Associate](https://blowstack.com/practice-exams/aws-certified-developer-associate), [DOP-C02 AWS Certified DevOps Engineer - Professional](https://blowstack.com/practice-exams/aws-certified-devops-engineer-professional), [SCS-C03 AWS Certified Security - Specialty](https://blowstack.com/practice-exams/aws-certified-security-specialty), [SAP-C02 AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional](https://blowstack.com/practice-exams/aws-certified-solutions-architect-professional). ## 9 key features of AWS Private Certificate Authority AWS Private Certificate Authority provides a scalable, secure, and centralized way to manage your certificates, featuring seamless AWS service integration, automated certificate issuance, customizable certificate templates, and a cost-effective pricing model. 1. **Central Management**: AWS Private Certificate Authority allows for centralized management of your entire certificate lifecycle, enabling the creation, storage, issuance, and revocation of certificates from a unified console. 2. **Scalability**: Designed to handle the demands of both small and large enterprises, it can scale up to manage millions of certificates effortlessly, ensuring that your growing needs are always met. 3. **Integration with AWS Services**: It offers seamless integration with other AWS services such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Certificate Manager for extended functionality and enhanced security. 4. **Automated Certificate Issuance**: Automates the process of certificate issuance and renewal, reducing manual effort and the potential for human error. This ensures that your applications are always secured with valid certificates. 5. **Customizable Certificate Templates**: Provides predefined certificate templates and allows customization of supported certificate fields and extensions using API passthrough, enabling detailed control over the certificate parameters and ensuring that they align with your organization’s security policies and compliance requirements. 6. **Cost-Effective**: AWS Private Certificate Authority offers a cost-effective solution for managing certificates. You pay for what you use with no upfront costs, making it a viable option for organizations of all sizes. 7. **Certificate Revocation Status**: Supports Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP), certificate revocation lists (CRLs), or both, and stores and manages CA certificates, CRLs, and OCSP responses. 8. **Externally Rooted CA Hierarchies**: Supports an AWS Private CA subordinate CA backed by a parent CA outside AWS Private CA, allowing an organization to retain its private root CA credentials on premises. 9. **Cross-Account CA Sharing**: A central private CA can be shared with application accounts using AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM), which manages cross-account sharing permissions and avoids requiring a separate CA in every account. ## Where AWS Private Certificate Authority is used AWS Private Certificate Authority is used for securing internal communications, authenticating devices and users, and signing code within organizations, ensuring encrypted transmissions, trusted device connections, secure access, and software integrity. 1. **Secure Internal Communications**: AWS Private Certificate Authority (PCA) is used to issue and manage certificates for securing internal communications within an organization. By using AWS PCA, organizations can encrypt network traffic within their environments, ensuring that sensitive data transmitted between servers, applications, and users is secure from eavesdropping or interception. This is critical for compliance and maintaining data privacy. 2. **Device Authentication**: AWS PCA facilitates the creation of digital certificates that serve as identities for devices within an IoT ecosystem or internal network. By issuing these certificates, AWS PCA enables organizations to authenticate devices, ensuring that only trusted devices can connect to their networks. This reduces the risk of unauthorized access and enhances the security of IoT implementations and internal systems. 3. **User Authentication**: Organizations can utilize AWS PCA to issue certificates for user authentication purposes. These certificates can be used in combination with other authentication methods to provide a more layered and secure authentication mechanism. This is particularly useful for securing access to sensitive applications and data, enabling secure remote access, and protecting against unauthorized access attempts. 4. **Code Signing**: AWS PCA can be used to issue certificates that sign code and applications within an organization's software development lifecycle. By signing code with a certificate, organizations can ensure the integrity and origin of their software, making it possible to detect tampered or unauthorized code. This is critical for maintaining trust and security in software distribution and deployment processes. ## How AWS Private Certificate Authority is priced AWS Private Certificate Authority pricing includes a monthly fee for each active CA and additional charges per issued certificate, with costs varying by certificate type and volume discounts applied. - **Pay-As-You-Go**: Charges for AWS Private Certificate Authority are based on the number of active Certificate Authorities you have created plus the cost per certificate issued. This model allows you to pay a monthly fee for each Private CA until deleted and a separate fee for every certificate issued by your Private CA. - **Certificate Issuance Fees**: In addition to the monthly CA fee, you will be charged for each certificate you issue. The fees vary based on the CA's operating mode: general-purpose or short-lived certificate mode. There are no upfront costs, and general-purpose mode prices decrease as the number of certificates issued increases, providing a volume discount, while short-lived certificate mode has a flat per-certificate issuance price. ## Services AWS Private Certificate Authority works with - **[Amazon API Gateway](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-api-gateway)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority can issue private certificates through ACM for API Gateway Regional and private custom domain names. Clients must trust the issuing CA to establish TLS connections. - **[Amazon CloudFront](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-cloudfront)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority can issue client certificates for CloudFront mutual TLS authentication. A CloudFront trust store containing the CA certificate allows CloudFront to validate certificates presented by clients. - **[Amazon EC2](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-ec2)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority can issue ACM-managed private certificates for use with ACM for Nitro Enclaves on EC2. This allows supported web servers to use private TLS certificates while protecting their private keys inside an enclave. - **[Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-elastic-container-service-(amazon-ecs))**: AWS Private Certificate Authority issues certificates for ECS Service Connect TLS encryption. ECS manages certificate issuance, deployment, and rotation so that traffic between Service Connect services can be encrypted automatically. - **[Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-elastic-kubernetes-service-(amazon-eks))**: AWS Private Certificate Authority integrates with cert-manager through the AWS Private CA Connector for Kubernetes add-on in EKS. Kubernetes workloads can automatically request and renew private certificates. - **[Amazon EventBridge](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-eventbridge)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority sends service events to EventBridge, including events concerning CA status and certificate expiration. EventBridge rules can route these events to notification or remediation workflows. - **[Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-managed-streaming-for-apache-kafka)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority supplies the CA trust used by Amazon MSK for TLS client authentication. An MSK cluster can be configured with private CA ARNs so that Kafka clients authenticate using certificates issued by those authorities. - **[Amazon OpenSearch Service](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-opensearch-service)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority can issue an ACM-managed private certificate for an OpenSearch Service domain's custom endpoint. Clients accessing that endpoint must trust the private certificate chain. - **[Amazon S3](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-s3)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority publishes certificate revocation lists to a configured S3 bucket and writes CA audit reports to S3. Applications can use the published revocation lists to check whether certificates have been revoked. - **[Amazon VPC](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-vpc)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority can be accessed through interface VPC endpoints without sending API traffic over the public internet. Its ACM-managed private certificates can also secure custom domain names for VPC Lattice services. - **[Amazon WorkSpaces](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-workspaces)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority supports certificate-based authentication for WorkSpaces. WorkSpaces obtains short-lived certificates to authenticate users to Active Directory after federated sign-in, avoiding an additional domain-password prompt. - **[Amazon WorkSpaces Applications](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/amazon-appstream-2)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority supports certificate-based authentication for domain-joined WorkSpaces Applications fleets. The service uses short-lived certificates to authenticate federated users to Active Directory without requiring them to enter their domain passwords again. - **[AWS Certificate Manager (ACM)](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-certificate-manager-(acm))**: AWS Private Certificate Authority provides the issuing CAs for ACM-managed private certificates. ACM requests certificates from an authorized CA, renews eligible certificates automatically, and makes them available to supported AWS services. - **[AWS Client VPN](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-client-vpn)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority can issue server and client certificates for AWS Client VPN. Server certificates are supplied through ACM, while client certificates support mutual certificate authentication. - **[AWS CloudFormation](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-cloudformation)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority resources can be provisioned through CloudFormation, including certificate authorities, CA activations, certificates, and permissions. Templates can define a private CA hierarchy and authorize ACM to issue certificates from it. - **[AWS CloudTrail](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-cloudtrail)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority records API activity in CloudTrail, including CA creation, certificate issuance, revocation, and permission changes. These records support auditing of private PKI administration and certificate requests. - **[AWS Config](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-config)**: AWS Config records supported AWS Private Certificate Authority resource configurations and evaluates them with compliance rules. The acm-pca-root-ca-disabled managed rule checks whether a private root CA is disabled. - **[AWS Directory Service](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-directory-service)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority Connector for Active Directory connects private CAs to directories supported by AWS Directory Service. It enables certificate enrollment for domain users and computers without operating an enterprise CA server. - **[AWS Elastic Beanstalk](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-elastic-beanstalk)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority can issue ACM-managed private certificates for HTTPS listeners on an Elastic Beanstalk environment's load balancer. The environment's load balancer configuration references the ACM certificate ARN. - **[AWS Fargate](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-fargate)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority provides certificates for ECS Service Connect TLS on services running on Fargate. ECS deploys and rotates those certificates to encrypt communication between participating services. - **[AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-identity-and-access-management-(iam))**: AWS Private Certificate Authority uses IAM policies to control CA administration, certificate issuance, revocation, and access to certificate templates. CA resource policies and permissions can also authorize cross-account issuance and ACM certificate management. - **[AWS Managed Services (AMS)](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-managed-services-(ams))**: AWS Private Certificate Authority is available through AMS Self-Service Provisioning in managed accounts. This lets teams provision and operate private CAs within an AMS-managed environment. - **[AWS Network Firewall](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-network-firewall)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority can supply certificates used by Network Firewall TLS inspection through ACM. A private CA can issue a subordinate CA certificate for outbound inspection or server certificates for inspecting inbound TLS traffic. - **[AWS PrivateLink](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-privatelink)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority supports PrivateLink interface endpoints for private access to its API. Applications and administrators can manage CAs and request certificates without requiring an internet gateway or NAT gateway. - **[AWS Resource Access Manager (AWS RAM)](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-resource-access-manager-(aws-ram))**: AWS Private Certificate Authority uses AWS RAM to share private CAs with other AWS accounts or an organization. Authorized recipients can request certificates from a centrally managed CA rather than creating a separate CA in every account. - **[AWS Resource Groups and Tag Editor](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-resource-groups-and-tag-editor)**: AWS Private Certificate Authority supports tagging CA resources, which can be discovered and organized through Resource Groups and Tag Editor. Tags can group CAs by application, environment, or ownership. - **[AWS Security Hub](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/aws-security-hub)**: AWS Security Hub evaluates AWS Private Certificate Authority resources through its security controls. Its root CA control produces a finding when a private root CA is not disabled. - **[Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-services-hub/elastic-load-balancing-(elb))**: AWS Private Certificate Authority issues ACM-managed private certificates that can be attached to supported load balancer TLS listeners. ACM can renew eligible certificates automatically, allowing internal applications to use private PKI without manually replacing listener certificates. ## What is AWS Private Certificate Authority AWS Private Certificate Authority (PCA) is a managed private CA service that extends AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) capabilities, allowing enterprises and developers to securely and efficiently manage the lifecycle of their own private certificates. This service offers a streamlined and scalable approach to create and manage private certificates without the need for expensive, specialized hardware or complex manual processes. The value of AWS PCA lies in its integration within the AWS ecosystem, simplifying tasks such as issuing, revoking, and renewing certificates specifically for internal servers, applications, services, and devices. AWS PCA enables the establishment of one or more private certificate authorities within an AWS account. These private CAs can hierarchically fit into your organization's needs, supporting a structure that can include root and subordinate CAs, mirroring typical, traditional enterprise trust models. This customizable hierarchy allows for a tailored approach to trust management and certificate issuance, empowering businesses to enforce their security standards and policies precisely. AWS Private CA's OCSP implementation does not support request extensions. For a batch query containing multiple certificates, the responder processes only the first certificate and drops the others. Revocations can take up to an hour to appear in OCSP responses. AWS Private CA supports CA hierarchies with up to five levels, and you can create multiple hierarchies, each with its own root. Additional hierarchy levels lengthen the certification path and increase end-entity certificate validation time. AWS Private CA supports two operating modes: general-purpose mode, which supports any permitted certificate validity period, and short-lived certificate mode, which issues certificates valid for no more than seven days. The service simplifies the otherwise complex and costly process of setting up and maintaining a private CA. There's no need to invest in dedicated hardware or worry about the software updates and security patches required for a self-managed CA infrastructure. AWS PCA is highly available and scales automatically to meet the demands of issuing and verifying certificates. This scalability ensures that as an organization grows, its ability to secure communication within its network and control access to its resources keeps pace, without the need for significant additional investment or reconfiguration. The per-CA certificate issuance quota is 100 million when revocation is disabled or uses partitioned CRLs and/or OCSP. CAs using complete CRLs instead have a quota of 1 million issued certificates. AWS PCA integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, enhancing security and efficiency across an organization's AWS infrastructure. For instance, when used in conjunction with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), it can simplify the process of issuing and managing certificates for individual users or systems, reinforcing security policies and access controls. Moreover, by leveraging ACM's capabilities, the management of private certificates becomes easier, supporting automatic renewal and deployment of certificates, thus reducing the risk of outages caused by expired certificates. Security is a paramount concern for AWS PCA, offering features such as automatic recording of certificate authority activity to AWS CloudTrail, which aids in audit and compliance efforts. CA private keys are stored and protected in AWS-managed hardware security modules, rather than encrypted using AWS Key Management Service (KMS). This protection not only bolsters security but also facilitates compliance with stringent regulatory standards that require detailed audit trails and high assurances of key protection. In summary, AWS Private Certificate Authority offers a formidable solution for businesses looking to efficiently manage their private certificates. It reduces the operational burden and costs associated with traditional private CA deployments. By leveraging the AWS cloud infrastructure, it provides a secure, scalable, and integrated environment for certificate lifecycle management, catering to the intricate needs of modern digital enterprises aiming to bolster their security posture in a complex cyber landscape. ## Concepts related to AWS Private Certificate Authority - [Certificate management](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-concepts-hub/certificate-management): Certificate management is the lifecycle control of digital certificates and their associated private keys to establish trusted identities and secure connections. - [Mutual TLS](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-concepts-hub/mutual-tls): Mutual TLS is a TLS configuration in which both communicating peers authenticate each other with digital certificates while encrypting data in transit. - [Public Key Infrastructure](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-concepts-hub/public-key-infrastructure): Public Key Infrastructure is the system of certificates, trusted authorities, policies, and processes used to bind identities to public keys and manage that trust over time. - [Public-Key Cryptography](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-concepts-hub/public-key-cryptography): Public-key cryptography uses mathematically related public and private keys to support encryption, digital signatures, and secure key establishment. - [Self-Signed Certificates](https://blowstack.com/tools/cloud-concepts-hub/self-signed-certificates): Self-signed certificates are digital certificates signed with their own associated private key rather than by a separate certificate authority.