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FoundationalActive Directory
How Active Directory Certificate Services Works
AD CS is not a single server; it is a hierarchy of certificate authorities plus a set of Active Directory objects that publish that hierarchy across the forest. This lesson builds the architecture mental model behind enterprise CAs, templates, and enrollment, and covers the step most explanations skip: how a certificate's identity claim maps back to an actual AD account.
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What you'll learn
- Two-tier CA hierarchy
- Configuration partition
- pKIEnrollmentService object
- Certificate-to-account mapping
- Strong vs weak mapping
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