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In one of my recent posts I have posted a bug in AppLocker path rule processing (see: The case of another AppLocker bug). I have opened Technical Support case and AppLocker product group was able to repro the issue and provide a temporary workaround. Here is official Microsoft's response:

We've investigated the issue and it appears to be a problem in the implementation of case-insensitive path comparison for characters outside the ASCII range. Fortunately it seems there is a workaround for the time being. If, in Local Security Policy, one specifies paths in all-uppercase characters, including uppercasing any non-ASCII characters as appropriate, then the rule will match properly. Concretely, for your example 'Mapīte', putting that string with lowercase ī in a rule's path in Local Security Policy will not work; however putting the string 'MAPĪTE' with uppercase Ī does seem to work.

Therefore if path in the path rule contains non-english characters (outside the ASCII 1-127), write these characters in upper case. Unfortunately you cannot use PowerShell for that conversion (by using String.ToUpper() method), because console host doesn't display diacritic characters, so you will have to do this task manually.

Many, many and many administrators request new certificates and mark private keys as exportable. Is this a good solution? Definitely no. Are there a reasons to do that? In most cases — no. Do I need to explain the subject? Definitely yes.

In many MS guides that are suited with custom certificate enrollment you may find certificate enrollment configuration INF file like this:


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Recently I decided to perform little changes on my OCSP Responder. I'm using offline CA (root) and have configured to include OCSP URL to all issued certificates. But some time I haven't OCSP configuration for  my root CA. And today I have completed all changes and now Root CA issues OCSP signing certs for appropriate OCSP configuration.

You can find required info about the subject on TechNet: Online Responder Installation, Configuration, and Troubleshooting Guide or in AskDS blog: Implementing an OCSP responder: Part IV - Configuring OCSP for use with Standalone CAs. However both links contains incorrect settings, therefore I'll post correct steps.


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Update 23.08.2010: added workaround to resolve the issue.


Today one customer claimed that AppLocker rules are not worked for his environment. He just created simple path rule and it didn't work. I have investigated this issue and I'm able to confirm that AppLocker don't apply path rules to a folder that contains non-english letters. Here is an example how to reproduce this issue. Assuming you have default Windows 7 Ultimate/Enterprise installation with C:\Windows as a system root folder.


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Disclaimer: this article contains information about modifying the IIS configuration files. Before you modify the IIS configuration file, make sure to back it up and make sure that you understand how to restore the file if a problem occurs.

This article contains information about unsupported operations. Before you modify any settings described below, make sure to backup your system and make sure that you understand how to restore the system if a problem occurs


A little abstract. The Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) is an Internet protocol used for obtaining the revocation status of an X.509 digital certificate. Why it has been developed? Prior to OCSP, clients checks certificate status (valid/revoked) using certificate revocation lists (CRLs). Client software downloads certificate issuer CRL file and examines its Revocation List property. If particular certificate serial number is present in CRL, certificate is considered as revoked or invalid and is rejected for usage. While CRLs may contain many revoked certificates, CRL size is grown. Typically empty CRL with default settings is about 600 bytes (the CRL size generally depends on field and extension textual information length and signing certificate key length). Each revoked certificate entry is about 80 bytes. If 10 certificates are revoked, CRL size will be: 600 + 80 * 10 = 1400 bytes. For 100 revoked certificates the size will be about 9 kilobytes. For 100 000 revoked certificates, the size will be approximately 8 megabytes.


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