Hi S-1-1-0, PS Crypto Guy is again on the board! Today I want to discuss about implementing Online Responder for Root and Policy CAs.

Abstract

Online Responder implements Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) as a part of alternate certificate validation mechanism (or revocation provider). Classic PKI uses Certificate Revocation Lists (CRL) to provide an information about revoked and untrusted certificates issued by the particular Certification Authority (CA). Most applications perform certificate checking for revocation by downloading and examining the particular issuer's CRL (or CRLs). If the presented certificate's serial number is listed in the corresponding issuer's CRL, an application rejects that certificate. During the CA lifecycle, you sometimes revoke some unnecessary and untrusted certificates. For example, if a certificate holder lost his/her certificate and associated private key, or a user left the company. Each revoked certificate's serial number is added to the CRL.

SYMPTOMS

Consider the following scenario. You have Windows Server 2008 R2 with installed Active Directory Certification Authority role. When you perform a full database backup by using either certutil.exe utility, or Certification Authority, the database log files are not truncated, as expected and backup set may contain up to 60 database log files. When using certutil.exe tool, it reports that log files are successfully truncated:

Backing up Database files: 100%
Backing up Log files: 100%
Truncating Logs: 100%
Backed up database to C:\Backup.
Database logs successfully truncated.
CertUtil: -backupDB command completed successfully.

Hi there! PowerShell Crypto Guy is again here!

Today I've finished SetupCA.ps1 script testing and I'm ready to share it with you. Of course this is not the first attempt to install CA role from cmdline, there is already SetupCA.vbs script written by Windows PKI team. To be honest, this is not the first PowerShell script for CA installation from cmdline. The first attempt was made by Hasain Alshakarti — http://secadmins.com/?dl_id=3. However this script just illustrates basic API functionality with ability to specify CA name, CA certificate validity and CA type. There is no error handling at all, even whether the CA can be installed on the computer.

Hi, S-1-1-0!

Finally I have finished another PowerShell PKI module release. This is not a significant release, but is quite improved. During module usage (I'm using certutil.exe less an less) I found some bugs in the previous release. Now they are fixed (at least those that were reported). The most significant change is in a new functionality. There are 3 set of cmdlets to manage the following CA settings:

Interface settings

Enrollment (ICertRequest3) and management (ICertAdmin2) interface management consist of four cmdlets:

SYMPTOMS

Consider the following scenario. You have Windows Server 2003 with installed Certification Authority and Web Enrollment components. When you try to access web enrollment pages from a Windows Vista-based (or newer) computer you receive a message box: