As some of you know, a lot of my background is in the world of Public Key Infrastructure.  I’ve been involved in every phase of PKI, including developing certification authority and ASN.1/DER encoding/decoding software, developing automated registration authority components, creating certificate policies and certification practices statements, as well as designing and rolling out production PKIs for large organizations.

Increasingly, organizations are turning to the use of Active Directory Certificate Services, otherwise known as Microsoft Certificate Services.  The reasons are many: it’s included with the purchase of your Windows Server product, it’s easy to configure and use, and did I mention it doesn’t cost any (additional) money?  The Microsoft product is a fairly good one and provides for a lot of customization and configuration so that it can be useful in just about every environment.  We use this product for our company-issued certificates which are used to encrypt email.

Read the rest of this entry »