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PKI infrastructure

Hello Experts,

I do contracting work for a fortune 500 company. The size of the network is huge. PKI is not my area of expertise but I've been doing some eavesdropping and have some questions.

They have an offline root CA and a bunch of subordinate CAs located globally. They are using OSCP protocol to "check" the certificate.

My question:

Typically, are the subordinate CA's also talking OSCP to each other? Or is it that typically the OSCP servers are separate from the sub-CA?

Do the OSCP servers check against an Certificate revocation list or are those two separate products?

Dave Howe

1) no, normally each sub-ca is complete in itself; trusting systems will check the oscp revocation status of the cert with the server defined in the cert (usally the same as the sub-ca server) and usually, unless the sub-ca has itself been sent out via group policy, check the sub-ca's revocation against the oscp target of the (offline) root CA as defined in the sub-ca's certificate. As it is hierarchical, sub-cas never need to talk to each other.

2) A oscp server MAY check a CRL - that is how microsoft currently do it, but some other non-microsoft solutions check a certificate db specific to the sub-ca via LDAP. the exact mechanism is rarely important except for troubleshooting when it goes wrong :)

trojan81

ASKER

Davehowe,

am I correct to say that typically the sub-ca is also acting as an oscp server?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Dave Howe

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