Posts on this page:

Disclaimer: by no means I’m an IPv6 expert and I’m not going to teach on different IPv6 configuration options and basics. In this post, I will focus solely on a specific subject.


As a part of my IPv6 learning path I played with stateful DHCPv6 and spent all weekends to sort one interesting. Here is my simple network setup:

image

basically, two private networks connected to a router.

  1. UDM Pro router
  2. L2 switch
  3. DHCPv6 stateful server
  4. DHCPv6 client
  5. IPv6 network: fd00:0:0:4::/64

The problem: clients receive IPv6 address from DHCPv6 and cannot communicate in same network using LUA (fd00) addresses.


Read more →

Hello everyone!

Today I’m excited to announce that I’m changing my position and moving to a great team at PKI Solutions starting with July 1!

Print

As you may know, I recently was graduated as bachelor in computer science and it is a great time to make another step forward. I wanted to progress in PKI area as even stronger specialist. Unfortunately, there is no PKI market here in Latvia (where I’m living) and had two options: become another regular software developer here in Latvia or find opportunities outside of my country. I was looking for a not very big team where I could develop myself and (it is very important) where the team can benefit from my knowledge and experience. While looking for job opportunities I realised that I’m not fitting good many positions, because either, overqualified or underqualified for particular position.

I heard about Mark “The PKI Guy” Cooper from his years at Microsoft and knew him as a world-class PKI specialist. Mark is a president of PKI Solutions, they offer PKI consulting services and run PKI training. I didn’t see myself there, because PKI Solutions is US-based and relocation to US isn’t an option for me, but pinged him anyway, maybe he could have options in EU. Otherwise, PKI Solutions is a perfect place where both parties can benefit: I can continue my self-development in the area and the company gets a strong knowledge and experience in programming with PKI. Surprisingly, Mark showed a high interest in my work and heritage and made an offer which doesn’t require relocation.

During the negotiation of the deal, Mark showed himself as an awesome man with a clear vision of his business’ needs and how I can fill certain gaps to make the PKI Solutions a solid all-around team where each piece consists of strong specialists in particular areas. In addition, Mark expressed a wish to continue the support of all my public work: blogging, technical forums and open-source projects. These days community is vital for IT market, you have to support the community and you will get paid back eventually. And I will play an integral role in making the PKI Solutions a more community-oriented company though knowledge sharing.

Along the personal move I’m moving my public projects to PKI Solutions as well, because we will build new tools on top of existing frameworks. These tools are moved:

I will continue these tools development as open-source projects. Nothing will change to existing users, it is only brand change.

As a PKI Solutions employee I will continue blogging about PKI and CryptoAPI at https://www.pkisolutions.com/author/crypt32/. I will continue to maintain this blog in future so no existing link will break, but all new PKI-related posts will go to new blog.

Hello readers!

Blogs are dying

Last week I was surprised when got the following message on Microsoft Blogs (eaxmple: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/crypto):

image

After some investigation, more disabled blogs were found. I tried to find any information about what is going on, but not much luck. All I was able to find is the fact that Microsoft is retiring their TechNet and MSDN platforms and move to..yes, another blogging engine. Though, not all blogs are moved. There are various rumors (not yet official) and they suggest that only most popular and trending (Azure!) blogs will be migrated. The rest blogs will be wiped. Silently. Other rumors suggest that it is blogs owner’s responsibility to move their blog to a new platform. Keep in mind, these are just rumors, the fact is that blogs silently disappear: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/brandonlinton/2018/11/05/retirement/. There was no official announcement from Microsoft about the trend or blog decommission schedule. Further investigation revealed that MSDN blogs are mosing to DevBlogs and TechNet blogs are moving to TechCommunity.


Read more →

This page contains a collection of downloadable whitepapers on Public Key Infratructure (PKI) and Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) published by Microsoft starting with Windows Server 2003 and up to Windows Server 2012. In the past, Microsoft has published a number of high-quality deep detail whitepapers on PKI and ADCS in particular. I’m often using them in consulting projects and online forums. Unfortunately, some of them were lost in time and there is no “one stop shop” with links to all PKI/ADCS whitepapers. I put efforts in collecting them in a single place and I believe this collection is a true gem for every PKI admin!

There are several reasons for this publication:

  • Whitepapers written against retired Windows Server 2003 are still relevant for the most recent Active Directory Certificate Services versions;
  • Some of documents are no longer available on Microsoft Download Center and download links are dead;
  • Most whitepapers are scattered over internet and are hard to find.

Here is the table of whitepapers I have collected:


Read more →

Hello S-1-1-0,

Today I’m continuing my certutil tips and tricks post series. In this post, I will get an introduction into cryptographic service provider architecture and how certutil can list and query them.

A short introduction to Cryptographic Providers

Windows Cryptography relies on a cryptographic service provider (CSP) architecture when performing cryptographic operations. CSP is a program module that represents an abstraction between client application and functions that utilize private keys. Applications are not required to interact with private key material directly, implement cryptographic functions. They only interact with known CSPs that implement private key storage database and cryptographic functions and operations. Here is a simple diagram that shows the relationship between client application and CSP:


Read more →