Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Security Handbook

Summary

Digital certificates are a fantastic way to offer authentication services in a wide array of network services. Microsoft helps users of a Windows environment implement this technology to increase security and reduce administration overhead, especially in a large organizational network or the Internet. You can deploy new services easier and faster because they can tie into the PKI to handle tasks that they used to handle by themselves, such as key storage, key lookup, and authentication. Windows 2000 is making a push for using certificates in its own internal service, including ADS. This area will continue to evolve and will someday replace traditional authentication services altogether.