PingFederate also checks to see whether a certificate has been revoked, using either Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) or the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OSCP). Depending on the content of the certificate in question and your requirements, the server will perform either of these checks during SSO or SLO processing for the following cases:

  • Signature verification
  • Validation of a client certificate used for authentication to PingFederate when the server is handling direct client requests
  • Validation of the server SSL certificate when PingFederate is acting as the client making an HTTPS request to a separate server

If a certificate is expired or revoked, the associated SSO or SLO transaction fails at runtime and an error is written to the transaction log. In the administrative console, an expired or revoked certificate is identified as such in the Status column of its respective Certificate Management list.

CRL revocation checking

This process involves querying a CRL distribution-point URL and ensuring that a certificate is not on the returned revocation list maintained at the site. The URL is specified in the certificate.

No setup is needed in the administrative console to enable CRL checking. PingFederate automatically checks CRLs if all of the following conditions are met:

  • The certificate contains the URL where the CA maintains its CRL.
  • The URL is accessible.
  • The returned CRL is signed and the signature verified.
  • CRL validation is not explicitly disabled as a failover option in the OCSP setup.

OCSP revocation checking

OCSP was developed as an alternative to CRL validation and provides a more centralized and potentially more reliable means of checking certificate status. In this scenario, an OCSP Responder URL is normally embedded in the incoming certificate (a configured default URL may be used, alternatively). The URL, maintained by the issuing CA, is used to query the certificate status.

The primary difference between OCSP and CRL checking is how the verification occurs. CRL checking requires the requesting client to determine if the certificate has been revoked (or if any of the certificates in the chain of issuer certificates has been revoked), based on the returned CRL. With OCSP, the client sends the certificate itself, and revocation checking is handled by the Responder server, which returns the certificate status.

A PingFederate administrator can enable and configure OCSP processing in the administrative console. The protocol may be used exclusively or in conjunction with CRL checking as a backup.

For more information about OCSP, see tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2560.

For configuration steps, see Configuring certificate revocation.