Lab 7

Lab 7

This lab looked at cryptography and how to use digital certificates with Windows.

Exercise 1

In this first exercise, I had a look at what is contained in a certificate and roughly how certificate management works in Windows Server.

Here are some screenshots as I went through the exercise:









This exercise consisted entirely of examining. There was no actual working with the systems, so not much to note.

Exercise 2

This exercise involved working with Windows Server to issue a certificate, then revoke the certificate. 

First off I had to create a certificate in the domain. Here is the resulting certificate:

Next, I had to bind the certificate to the default site. As you can see in the screenshot below, the SSL certificate is bound to the https port of the site.


Here, we get a certificate error:


And here we successfully connect to the site with the proper URL using HTTPS:


Now that we successfully created and used the certificate, we can revoke the certificate so it cannot be used anymore:


Certificate revocations get put on CRLs (Certificate revocation list) Which get published at specific intervals. This determines how quickly a certificate will be revoked:

Critical thinking

Certificates are used to secure traffic and ensure that traffic is coming from the right place. Knowing how to use certificates is important. Usually certificates are used to make web pages secure so that users accessing the pages can be sure that the site is legitimate, and that the traffic is encrypted.

There wasn't much different that I could have done in this lab. It was a fairly easy having not many steps, and I didn't run into any issues.