Secure Your Email, Part 2

In "Secure Your Email, Part 1," April 2002, InstantDoc ID 24226, I outlined Exchange Server's Advanced Security features. Now I want to show you how to set up and install Advanced Security to work with a Windows 2000 certificate server and Microsoft Outlook 2002 clients. But first you need to install a couple of vital infrastructure components: the Certificate Authority (CA) and Exchange Key Management Service (KMS).

Install the CA
The CA is the security component that issues certificates to users. Microsoft offers two CA products: The Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack includes one, and the other is an optional Win2K component. The Win2K CA boasts several improvements over the NT version, so I recommend that you use the Win2K CA even if you're still using NT 4.0 and Exchange Server 5.5. For this column, I used a combination of the Win2K CA, Exchange 5.5 (Service Pack 3—SP3—or later), and Outlook 2002.

To install the CA, open the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs applet. Click Add/Remove Windows Components to start the Windows Components Wizard. Select Certificate Services. The wizard warns you that after installing the CA, you can't change your computer's name. As a result, you won't be able to rename the computer, join a domain, or leave a domain. (The computer and domain name are embedded in the CA certificate, so if you make any of these changes, you'll invalidate all the certificates you've issued.) Click Details in the Windows Components dialog box to install the Web Services component, which lets users request certificates through a friendly Web interface. (Exchange doesn't require the use of the Web Services component.)

Next, the wizard prompts you to specify the type of CA that you want. You can choose from four types: enterprise root CA, enterprise subordinate CA, standalone root CA, and standalone subordinate CA. The primary distinction between enterprise CAs and standalone CAs is that enterprise CAs require Active Directory (AD) and automatically publish issued certificates in AD. Because you're using Exchange 5.5 to publish certificates, you don't need AD, although you can specify an enterprise CA type if you're installing the CA on a machine that's a member of an AD domain.

The distinction between root and subordinate CAs is also straightforward. All CAs sign the certificates they issue so that clients can ensure the validity of the certificates, but how can you determine whether the CA is trustworthy? A root CA signs its own CA certificates (i.e., self-signed certificates), whereas a subordinate CA's certificate obtains its signature from a higher-level CA (companies often use third-party CAs for this purpose).

Suppose I work for Microsoft and create a root CA called Microsoft. I can then create subordinate CAs for the Windows, Exchange, and SQL Server teams, and the teams can use their own CAs to issue certificates. An outsider who wants to verify a certificate that the Exchange team's CA issued can validate the CA's signature on the certificate, and he or she can also verify the root CA's signature on the issuing CA's certificate. You should create a subordinate CA only if you have a root CA in place. Therefore, check with your security or network infrastructure team before you install a new CA. Typically, Advanced Security installations create a root CA.

After you select the CA type, you must provide identifying information for the CA's certificate. The values you provide will be Unicode-encoded, stored as attributes in the CA's certificate, and signed either by the subordinate CA or by the root CA. You can't change any of these attributes after the system generates the CA certificate, and generating a new CA certificate might result in the need to reissue certificates to all your clients—so be careful about the information you provide.

Next, the wizard asks you to specify a location for your certificate databases. Make sure you place these databases in a location that permits backup—if you lose the ability to restore the CA's private key, you'll need to generate a new private key and reissue certificates to all your clients. After you select a location, Windows finishes the CA installation.

Choose a Policy
Now you need to inform the certificate server about which certificate-issuance policy to use. To install the Exchange-specific policy module and tell the CA to use it, follow these steps:

1. From your Exchange 5.5 (SP3 or later) CD-ROM, copy \server\support\kms\expolicy\i386\expolicy.dll to \%systemroot%\system32 on the CA computer.
2. Register the policy DLL with the regsvr32 command (regsvr32 expolicy.dll).
3. Open the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Certification Authority snap-in, right-click your CA server's name, and choose Properties.
4. Switch to the Policy Modules tab, then click Select.
5. Select the Legacy Policy Module option, click OK, and close the Properties dialog box.
6. Permit the Certification Authority snap-in to restart the certificate server.

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