Reminder: LDAP signing requirements in March 2020

In August 2018, Microsoft issued a security advisory ADV190023 Microsoft Guidance for Enabling LDAP Channel Binding and LDAP Signing about unsigned LDAP communication blocking in Active Directory starting with March 2020. A quick poll identified that not all customers are aware about upcoming changes or have prepared to them. What is LDAP Binding? LDAP binding is a […]
Windows Server 2016 – What’s New with ADCS

Well, here it is – the concise list of updates and changes to Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) for Windows Server 2016. I will go ahead and tell you now that there aren’t any new earth shattering features. Consider this an incremental set of improvements to ADCS. Remember that we still have things like Elliptical Curve […]
OCSP Magic Number
The magic number is a value that states when CRLs will be processed over OCSP, specifically it is when the total number of cached OCSP responses from a single OCSP responder URL on behalf of a single certificate authority will stop performing OCSP and start processing CRLs. This will occur if the number of cached […]
Announcing our Microsoft KB Archive Service
We have been working on an interesting skunkworks style project and are pleased to share our work with all of you. It all started when we started to notice Microsoft was archiving/deleting Support KB articles from its site – often even when the information was still pertinent. We started noticing a number of the items […]
Backing up ADCS Certificate Authorities (Part 2 of 2)
In my last blog post (Backing up ADCS Certificate Authorities Part 1) I covered the inner workings of how ADCS and the Jet database works to maintain the CA data. In this post I am going to go over a comprehensive PowerShell script that I wrote to perform a full backup of all necessary ADCS […]
Announcing the Online PKI Assessmental Portal
Editor’s Note (2025 Update): The Online PKI Assessment Portal is no longer offered. Its capabilities have evolved into PKI Spotlight—a modern platform designed to give you continuous visibility into the health and security of your PKI. If you’re considering an assessment today, Spotlight is where to start. Contact us to learn how you can get […]
Backing up ADCS Certificate Authorities (Part 1 of 2)
One of the areas I have spoken about extensively at conferences and cover in our training classes is the unique issues associated with backing up and managing your ADCS Certificate Authority. There are several items I would like to address in this two-part series: CA Database and log file structure Unique issues with VM Snapshots with ADCS […]