Understanding Active Directory Certificate Services Containers in Active Directory
As part of joining PKI Solutions, several blog posts from my old site are re-posted here for visibility and thoroughness. Hello folks! Today I want to explain in details about Active Directory containers related to ADCS (Active Directory Certificate Services), their purposes and how they work. Intro All ADCS related containers are stored in configuration […]
Ignore Revocation Checking – The bane of my existence!
As students in my PKI training classes know, one of the areas I am a vocal about is the blind use of the CRLF_REVCHECK_IGNORE_OFFLINE setting in a PKI environment. I am so adamantly against the use of this setting, I personally refuse to ever explicitly share or type the syntax to enable this nasty beast. Unfortunately […]
‘The handle is invalid. 0x80070006 (WIN32: 6)’ when dumping CA database
As part of joining PKI Solutions, several blog posts from my old site are re-posted here for visibility and thoroughness. Issue Consider the following scenario: you are dumping CA database by using certutil, PowerShell or any other tool that utilizes ICertView2 interface and at some point you receive the following error Certutil: CertUtil: -view command […]
The case of accidentally deleted user certificates
As part of joining PKI Solutions, several blog posts from my old site are re-posted here for visibility and thoroughness. Sometimes users accidentally delete their certificates from personal store. After that users are not able to perform certificate-based tasks, i.e. decrypt files or mail, sign data and authenticate. Some organizations implement Key Archival for certificate […]
Hidden switches of Certutil.exe and Certreq.exe
Hey Kids, Rock and Roll! Two of the most reliable toolsets in Windows for the last two decades have been the tandem of certutil.exe and certreq.exe. It’s no secret there are a wealth of very useful functions exposed in the basic usage of these tools, also documented publicly here: certutil.exe public documentation certreq.exe public documentation […]
New Certutil Argument – DownloadOCSP and Details of Caching issue with -Verify
During the development of my new ADCS Advanced PKI Training Class, I was working on creating a process to demonstrate how to manipulate the OCSP caching behavior in Windows. If you aren’t already aware, Microsoft OCSP responders use the expiration date of the authoritative CRL used for their answers as the expiration date (Next Update […]
Enabling Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) Advanced Audit
Hello S-1-1-0, here is another unscheduled blog post on enabling advanced audit in Microsoft CA. Today I went through another thread on Twitter which suggests how to enable advanced audit in Microsoft CA. Throughout the thread it was apparent that only partial solution was provided. Windows CA auditing engines Microsoft CA implements a set of […]
Crafting a dummy certificate with specific serial number in Microsoft ADCS
Today I went through a thread on Twitter with claims that there is no supported way to revoke a rogue certificate with known serial number in Microsoft CA. TL;DR skip to next section The long story short: the thread originally was focused on an OCSP deterministic response support. The idea behind this is that by default, Microsoft […]