Ramblings on IT and Security
So, this turned out to be an interesting quest. I had reinstalled my lab Enterprise (issuing) CA, configured the server, issued new CA certificates, and created a new Remote Desktop certificate template. The next step should have been simple: publish the template.
Except it wasn’t. When I tried to publish the template, it didn’t show up.
Continue readingI know, I know, last time I promised that this blog post would be about renewing the issuing CA certificate, but I have something cool today as well. I ran into an issue with my lab CA that made me dive into a rabbit hole filled with advanced certutil commands and direct access to the database. Instead of treating this as an incident and forget all the commands I’ve used to view and alter information I thought I would share the information.
When working with Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS), most people interact with the Certification Authority through the MMC console. It provides a clear view of issued certificates, pending requests, and revoked certificates. It’s the easiest way. However, behind that interface sits a database that’s per default located in the directory: “C:\WINDOWS\system32\CertLog” and has the name of your CA, in my case “Corp-Enterprise-CA.edb“.
It was that time again. My Root CA had reached about 60% of its certificate lifetime, which means it was time to renew the certificate, a.k.a the dreaded ADCS Root CA Renewal (plays dramatic music). As I mentioned in a previous blog, if you’re going through the effort of renewing the certificate anyway, it’s generally a good idea to renew the key pair as well. However, there are a few gotchas that come with doing that, and that’s exactly what I want to cover in this week’s post.
Along the way I ran into a couple of things that are worth knowing before you start this process yourself. Nothing too dramatic, but definitely the kind of details that can come back to bite you later if you’re not aware of them.
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