The ACME protocol has been approved as an IETF standard.

The ACME (Automated Certificate Management Environment) protocol was officially standardised by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Using the ACME protocol, certification authorities can automate the process of issuing and verifying a certificate.

Benefits of ACME Standardization

Having a standardised protocol to issue and manage certificates brings the following benefits:

• Improves the quality of the program ecosystem. Developers can adhere to the single protocol instead of supporting different program components through arbitrary APIs.
• Switching between certification authorities has been simplified, meaning minimization of the technical binding to one CA.

At the moment, according to the description of the protocol, ACME is hardly suitable for issuing OV and EV SSL certificates, but it can play an important role in this process. Potentially, ACME means some of the steps of the validation process that are required for issuing OV and EV certificates are automated.

Major certification authorities are already beginning to implement the ACME protocol. As follows from open sources, DigiCert is testing the implementation of ACME support in its CertCentral certificate management platform. ACME support is also present in the Sectigo certificate manager.

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