The DBMS must only accept end entity certificates issued by DoW Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) or DoW-approved PKI Certification Authorities (CAs) for the establishment of all encrypted sessions.

Only DoW-approved external PKIs have been evaluated to ensure that they have security controls and identity vetting procedures in place that are sufficient for DoW systems to rely on the identity asserted in the certificate. PKIs lacking sufficient security controls and identity vetting procedures risk being compromised and risk issuing certificates that enable adversaries to impersonate legitimate users.

The authoritative list of DoW-approved PKIs is published at https://www.cyber.mil/pki-pke.

This requirement focuses on communications protection for the DBMS session rather than for the network packet.