Having covered the basics of certificate enrollment and relevant Windows APIs in previous posts, this post will look at how you can programmatically create a certificate signing requests by using the Certificate Enrollment API (CertEnroll).
One thing certreq and the Certificate Manager MMC snap-in have in common is that they rely heavily on Windows’ built-in APIs for managing certificates, encryption, and keys. This post takes a deeper look at which APIs Windows provides for cryptography, key management, certificate management, and certificate enrollment.
In the last post, we looked at how certificates, private keys, and certificate signing requests relate to another. In this post, we’ll look at three common ways to create a certificate signing request (CSR) which can then be submitted to a certificate authority (CA) for signing.
Many of the protocols we use every day rely on certificates. The process to request and obtain a new certificate from a CA is called certificate enrollment. This post explains the basic concepts behind certificate enrollment.
If your plan is to develop a tool or desktop app instead of a server-side application, the benefits of application default credentials are less obvious and reusing the user’s personal gcloud credentials instead might seem attractive. But there are some pitfalls.
gcloud manages two sets of credentials, your personal credentials and application default credentials. Having two separate credentials might seem redundant and can cause surprises the first time you use one of the Google Cloud client libraries. But the two credentials serve different purposes.
Installing the Remote Desktop Connection Manager requires administrator privileges. That can be a problem in a corporate environment where you might not have local administrator rights. Fortunately, there is an easy way to overcome this limitation by performing an administrative installation.
Google APIs use OAuth 2.0 for authentication and authorization. To call an API, you first have to obtain an access token for the right scope and then pass it to the respective API by using the Authorization HTTP header.
But the trouble with access tokens is that they are short-lived, and you somehow have to deal with expiring tokens…
Once you’ve signed in on google.com, the Cloud Console, or any other Google site, your browser session remains valid for multiple days. Not being prompted to sign in over and over again is convenient and at least in typical consumer scenarios, the risk that comes along with keeping the session is limited.
Things can look different in a corporate scenario where users might have access to sensitive data. Keeping sessions alive for 14 days (which is the default) might seem a little risky and might not be in line with an enterprise’s idea of security. G Suite Business and Cloud Identity Premium therefore allow you to change the default session length to a different period such as 8 hours. This setting applies to all Google services, not only GCP.
Recently, Google introduced another way to control session lifetime by allowing you to control the session length for Cloud Console and gcloud sessions.
A few days ago, I released version 1.1.22 of the Cloud IAP plugin for Remote Desktop on Github.
The three main new features in this release are: