NetBox Certificates Plugin

NetBox Certificates Plugin adds certificate inventory and lifecycle management to NetBox. It manages X.509 certificates, encrypted private keys, CSRs, bundles, service relationships, certificate health, policy checks, alerting, imports, secure exports, and links to native NetBox objects.

Compatibility

Features

• X.509 certificate inventory with parsed subject, issuer, SAN, validity, fingerprint, signature, key, and CA metadata
• encrypted private-key storage
• CSR inventory and generation
• certificate/key/CSR bundles with cryptographic identity validation
• Certificate Authorities view for imported CA certificates
• hierarchical Groups with expandable tree presentation
• Services for modeling certificate consumers and deployment metadata
• many-to-many Service relationships to Certificates, Private Keys, CSRs, Bundles, and Groups
• generic links from plugin objects to native NetBox objects such as Devices, VMs, Interfaces, IP Addresses, Sites, Circuits, VLANs, VRFs, Tenants, and Clusters
• Certificate Policies
• Health and Validity findings for expiration, chain problems, weak algorithms, duplicates, mismatches, orphaned objects, Service/SAN conflicts, and key reuse
• configurable SMTP and webhook alerts based on Health findings
• unified object import for PEM, DER, PKCS#7/CMS, PKCS#12/PFX, and supported archives
• NetBox-native filters, saved filters, metadata export, bulk edit, bulk delete, tags, custom fields, ownership, change logging, REST API, GraphQL, and global search
• secure material export with SHA-256 manifests

Navigation

OVERVIEW
├── Expiration Dashboard
├── Certificate Authorities
├── Cryptographic Vault
└── Health and Validity

INVENTORY
├── Groups
├── Services
├── Bundles
├── Certificates
├── Private Keys
└── CSRs

OPERATIONS
├── Import Objects
├── Generate CSR
└── Alerts Configuration

Services

A Service represents a system or endpoint that consumes certificate material. Examples include websites, APIs, repositories, reverse proxies, load balancers, Kubernetes endpoints, mail systems, VPNs, databases, registries, and internal applications.

Service metadata includes status, type, environment, deployment, deployment metadata, protocol, URLs, hostname, port, SNI name, criticality, external reference, contact, owner, tags, custom fields, description, and comments.

deployment includes common UI suggestions and accepts custom values. deployment_metadata stores deployment-specific structured metadata such as a namespace, secret name, ingress name, virtual host, or configuration reference.

Certificate Authorities

The Certificate Authorities view lists imported Certificate objects with X.509 CA=true, including roots, intermediates, and subordinate CAs. Root and chain resolution are maintained internally from certificate relationships.

Cryptographic Vault

Cryptographic Vault provides a consolidated overview of Certificates, CA Certificates, Private Keys, CSRs, Bundles, Services, unassigned objects, and active Health findings.

Health and Validity

Health findings are persistent, searchable NetBox objects with severity, status, evidence, affected object, related object, and detection timestamps.

Checks include:

• certificate expiration and not-yet-valid state
• certificate-chain resolution and issuer validation
• expired or invalid issuers
• ambiguous issuers and chain loops
• weak RSA, elliptic-curve, DSA, and signature configurations
• duplicate Certificates, Private Keys, CSRs, and Bundles
• incomplete or mismatched Bundles
• orphaned private keys
• Certificate/Private Key/CSR relationship mismatches
• Service hostname, URL, and SNI coverage against certificate SANs
• private-key reuse across Services
• non-wildcard certificate reuse across unrelated Service endpoints
• Certificate Policy violations

Certificate Policies

Policies can enforce certificate requirements such as minimum RSA size, permitted key and signature algorithms, permitted curves, maximum validity, SAN requirements, wildcard rules, CA eligibility, issuer restrictions, and private-key reuse policy.

Policies can be assigned to Services, Certificates, CSRs, and Bundles.

Alerts

Alert Rules select Health findings by code, category, severity, status, object type, tag, owner, Service, Group, Policy, or expiration threshold.

Alert Channels support SMTP and HTTP webhooks. SMTP passwords and webhook configuration are encrypted at rest with the plugin Fernet key.

Alert Events record delivery results.

Import

The unified importer supports:

• PEM and DER X.509 certificates
• private keys
• PKCS#10 CSRs
• PKCS#7/CMS containers
• PKCS#12/PFX
• supported archives
• multiple unrelated objects in one request
• multiple Bundle candidates grouped by matching public-key identity

Ambiguous cryptographic matches are rejected instead of guessed.

Export

NetBox-native export remains available for metadata tables.

Material export is available for Certificates, Private Keys, CSRs, Bundles, and CA Certificates. Multi-file exports include manifest.json with object identifiers, applied filters, filenames, SHA-256 checksums, and available cryptographic fingerprints.

Private-key material is decrypted only for authorized downloads and is never included in ordinary metadata serializers, search indexes, filters, GraphQL metadata, or metadata archives.

REST API

Base path:

/api/plugins/ssl-certificates/

Primary endpoints:

groups/
services/
bundles/
certificates/
private-keys/
csrs/
certificate-authorities/
certificate-policies/
health-findings/
object-links/
alert-rules/
alert-channels/
alert-events/

See docs/API.md.

Installation

Add the package to /opt/netbox/local_requirements.txt:

netbox-certificates-plugin==1.0.3

Enable the plugin:

PLUGINS = [
    "netbox_certificates",
]

PLUGINS_CONFIG = {
    "netbox_certificates": {
        "encryption_key": "YOUR_FERNET_KEY",
    },
}

Generate a Fernet key for a new installation:

/opt/netbox/venv/bin/python - <<'PY'
from cryptography.fernet import Fernet
print(Fernet.generate_key().decode())
PY

Run the standard NetBox upgrade:

cd /opt/netbox
sudo ./upgrade.sh

Verify:

sudo -u netbox /opt/netbox/venv/bin/python /opt/netbox/netbox/manage.py check
sudo systemctl restart netbox netbox-rq

For upgrades from 0.5.0, keep the existing Fernet key and read UPGRADE.md before deployment.

Security

• private keys are encrypted at rest
• SMTP passwords and webhook configuration are encrypted at rest
• decrypted private-key material is excluded from normal API, GraphQL, search, filtering, and metadata exports
• sensitive download responses use cache-prevention headers
• multi-file exports include SHA-256 manifests
• ObjectLinks are restricted to public NetBox/plugin models
• sensitive material operations retain additional permission checks

See SECURITY.md.

Documentation

• Upgrade
• Compatibility
• API
• Services
• Health and Validity
• Policies
• Alerts
• Exports
• Permissions
• Bulk Operations
• Data Model
• Publishing
• Uninstall
• Validation

License

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE and NOTICE.