pki-design

pki-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills. It costs 182 tokens per session (1,989 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

Guidance for designing public key infrastructure, the systems that issue and manage certificates used for identity, encryption, and signing, across Azure and hybrid environments. It covers certificate authorities, Key Vault, hardware protection, and certificate-based authentication.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to design certificates for website encryption, service-to-service mTLS, devices, code signing, email signing, and Microsoft Entra certificate-based authentication.
Why use it?
It helps teams decide where certificates should come from, how they should be protected and trusted, and how they should renew. This avoids treating certificate management as merely storing a secret.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to design certificates for website encryption, service-to-service mTLS, devices, code signing, email signing, and Microsoft Entra certificate-based authentication.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/pki-design
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills --skill pki-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for pki-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/pki-design/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/pki-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/pki-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/pki-design/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for pki-design

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/pki-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills/pki-design.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 182 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,989 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00182 $0.01989
Opus 5 $0.00091 $0.00994
Sonnet 5 $0.00036 $0.00398
Haiku 4.5 $0.00018 $0.00199

Measured 12d ago against content hash 8ab2a052568d, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

pki-design scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/pki-design/SKILL.md · 128 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 128 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

PKI Design

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) issues and manages the digital certificates that underpin authentication, encryption, and signing. In Azure-centric and hybrid environments this means combining a trusted CA hierarchy, Key Vault storage, automated lifecycle, and certificate-based authentication.

When to use

Designing certificate issuance, distribution, and lifecycle for: Entra phishing-resistant CBA, TLS / mTLS for services, device identity (Wi-Fi 802.1x, VPN), code signing, and S/MIME. Use this skill when the question is "where do certificates come from and how do they renew", not "how do I store one secret".

Do not use this skill for Key Vault secrets/keys (azure-key-vault) or Entra ID model (entra-id).

Pick the CA strategy by use case

If the use case is... CA choice Notes
Internet-facing TLS (websites, APIs) Public CA (DigiCert, GlobalSign, Let's Encrypt) Always; private CAs aren't trusted by browsers
Internal app TLS, mTLS, service-to-service Internal issuing CA (AD CS or managed) Private CA chain trusted internally
Entra certificate-based authentication Internal CA published to Entra trust store Pair with strong binding policy
Device identity (Wi-Fi 802.1x, VPN) AD CS or third-party PKI + Intune SCEP/PKCS Auto-enrollment essential
Code signing EV code signing cert from a public CA Hardware token; protect aggressively
S/MIME email signing/encryption Third-party public CA (DigiCert, Sectigo) Internal CAs not trusted by external recipients
Short-lived workload certs (Kubernetes) cert-manager with ACME or internal issuer Minutes-to-hours TTL

Rule of thumb: never use a private CA for internet-facing services and never use a public CA for internal certificates at scale (cost + agility). Two distinct chains.

Approach

  1. Design the CA hierarchyOffline root CA + one or more online issuing CAs. Root signs issuing CA certs (long validity, e.g. 10-20 years), issuing CAs sign end-entity certs (1-2 year validity). Verify: root CA host is powered off or air-gapped except for CRL signing and issuing CA renewal.

Read the full file on GitHub · 128 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 128 lines · 182 tokens per session scan A 8ab2a052568d

Subscribe to this mod's changes

pki-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinayaklatthe/microsoft-security-skills (173 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 182 tokens to every session and 1,989 once invoked, about $0.0009 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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