Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit

Understanding the Requirements for and Use of Certificates in Federation

Certificates are the mechanism that is relied on very heavily to provide authentication in federation—and in all of Office Communications Server 2007. If you have read the initial chapters on the setup and deployment of Office Communications Server, you already know that a lot of certificates are used in the server communication paths. This is not by accident—defense in depth requires that the servers re-affirm that the incoming or outgoing traffic is from trusted sources. Servers have difficulty responding to challenge/response authentication methods, similar to what is presented to a user logging on. Passwords can be compromised, as the typical password is used over and ...