Month: September 2011

Microsoft BitLocker Administration & Monitoring – intro

Why we should BitLocker (or any other drive encryption) should be clear. A stolen laptop is only worth as much as the retrievable data on it + the value of the laptop. In large enterprises this could be millions of dollars, but for personal use this could lead to embarrassment or worse.

But enterprises seem to struggle with the implementation of BitLocker, amongst the pain points:

  • No auditing – unsure which laptops have it enabled or which ones don’t
  • Administrative overhead – administrators must manually enable it
  • Scripting – if enabled during deployment scripting is required
  • Storage of keys in Active Directory – clear text storage of recovery keys

In order to cope with these and other challenges, Microsoft has released the BitLocker Administration and Monitoring toolkit. For the ones that try to download it on the website, sorry, it is only available in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack which comes with a software assurance agreement with Microsoft.

This post goes into the architecture, what users see of it.. and more in depth knowlegde.. soon, the post with the install instructions!

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2FA via the cloud – Cryptocard

So many of you probably have been wondering what type of 2FA I am using for my tests. Instead of setting up internal servers, dealing with encryption keys and various tokens, I stumbled upon a cloud service that handles all of this for you. Now before we dive into the “commercial” part (although I did not see any money from them) the basics for configuring TMG with radius are also covered in this post, so if you prefer another vendor, your own radius/2FA solution, this post still applies.

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Office 365 – OWA Access

When migrating to Office 365 users must retain access to Outlook Web Access. While the guides for the OWA access are present, users see themselves being challenged for username and password multiple times. This is even worse when most users are located on Exchange 2007 in a mixed environment.
In order to cope with this problem TMG can be setup to only authenticate users once. Even more, users can also be authenticated already when they are sent to the Office365 OWA site and need to request a token from the ADFS server.

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