Patent ID: 8656155

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving a request for digital certificate public information; accessing, via a processor in response to the request, at least one registry that identifies hosted digital certificate public information published by a plurality of distributed certificate management agents, where at least one of the plurality of distributed certificate management agents comprises a remote certificate management agent; determining, from the accessed at least one registry, whether a local digital certificate public information directory exists and stores the requested digital certificate public information; extracting the requested digital certificate public information from at least one of the local digital certificate public information directory and at least one digital certificate stored within at least one digital certificate storage repository; and providing the requested digital certificate public information in response to the digital certificate public information request; where, in response to determining that the local digital certificate public information directory does not exist, further comprising: dynamically creating the local digital certificate public information directory; and storing the requested digital certificate public information within the dynamically-created local certificate public information directory to support additional digital certificate information requests.