AD CS Foundations

Understand what AD CS is, why organizations deploy it, and why its integration with Active Directory identity makes it one of the most consequential — and most commonly misconfigured — components in enterprise Windows environments.

Understand how certificate templates control what certificates get issued and who can request them, and why template configuration and enrollment permissions are the primary attack surface in AD CS — not the certificate authority itself.

Learn to identify and exploit certificate templates where a low-privilege user can request authentication certificates for any identity in the domain, and explain why this common misconfiguration creates a direct path from standard domain user to domain compromise.