The Microsoft Certificate Enrollment Control
With the technology taking over every part of the existing world, one needs to learn about every field pertaining to it. Here, we will focus on the Microsoft Certificate Enrollment Control. We will also learn about the process of enrollment and the various options available for public key based services and applications in Windows CE.NET.
The Microsoft windows CE public key based services and applications require digital certificates. Along with its private key the certificate will establish a trusted identity for any entity by using the public key based services and applications. Typically, Certificate enrollment involves the client as well as the certification authority.
The client here is considered to be responsible for initiating the enrollment request and furnish all the relevant information to the certificate authority. In turn, the certificate authority is responsible for request validation and also issuing of the certificate.
In the Windows Desktop environment, the Microsoft certificate services provide a set of customizable active server pages to deal with the various levels of the certificate enrollment. Most of these pages then communicate with a windows desktop client through the Microsoft certificate enrollment control. The Microsoft Certificate Enrollment control is a Microsoft active X control that handles the entire client side of operations in the enrollment process. The ASP pages along with the certificate enrollment control, provide an internet browser based enrollment sample. However, many windows CE devices do not have a browser but they require certificate enrollment capabilities. Because of this particular constraint, the Enroll.exe sample provides the enrollment capabilities even in an environment which does not have a fully functional browser. The Microsoft Certificate Enrollment Control can be used by an application which has to request for a certificate to be issued to a named subject. The control is designed to accept the data in the binary string format or the BSTR. The data may be obtained either from a web page or a user interface of the visual Basic or the Visual C++ development system. The output which is obtained from the certificate enrollment control is a PKCS #10 certificate request. This certificate request can be transferred to the Certification authority or the CA. When the requested certificate is returned by the CA, the application passes the PCKS #7 message back to the certificate enrollment control where the single or the chain of certificates are extracted. The returned certificate is not modified at all. The certificate can now be accessed by any certificate aware application from the store. Therefore, the enrollment process results in a certificate being issued. This certificate is usually stored on a user's smart card. Therefore, the Microsoft Certificate Enrollment Control is a very important aspect of the Microsoft certifications services.
Microsoft Certificate
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