Configuring and Troubleshooting CRL Distribution Points (CDP) and Authority Information Access (AIA)

CDP and AIA Points can sometimes be confusing but are the most important pillars of a functional PKI environment. Configuration of proper CDP and AIA points can result in a better and healthy PKI environment, and debugging those issues can be equally tricky. This article intends to be a way to stop any CDP/AIA issues that one may face during the PKI configuration and debugging stages.

Configuration of CDP/AIA Points

Proper configuration of CDP and AIA points can be tricky. It involves proper permission of where CRL needs to be published and where they would be accessed.

Improper configuration of CDP can result in two scenarios

• CRL fails to be published, or
• CRLs cannot be accessed

Configuration of AIA

AIA is the easiest to configure. If OCSP is used, the AIA decimal point may include 34; otherwise, it’s always 2.

Decimal Value 1 is included when publishing in the %windir%\System32\certsrv\CertEnroll location. It can also be included to publish directly onto the AIA location if proper permissions are provided.

[Note: If the location is behind a load balancer, the CA cannot access both servers and may cause failure. Please do not publish on those locations; instead manual copy is recommended]

Decimal Value 2 is included when the URL is to be added to the issued certificates. These URLs act as the AIA points from where the certificates can be extracted.

Configuration of CDP

Configuration of CDP can depend on how the CA is configured, how the CRLs are published and accessed, and if Delta CRLs are published.

Decimal values are used accordingly based on how the CDP needs to be configured.

Decimal Value 1 is mostly used to publish CRLs to %windir%\System32\certsrv\CertEnroll location or to those locations where CA has proper permissions to access. If Delta CRLs are also published, 65 (1+64) is used.

[Note: If the location is behind a load balancer, the CA cannot access both servers and may cause failure. Please do not publish on those locations; instead manual copy is recommended]

Decimal Value 2 includes the URL or location and lets it act as a CDP location from where base or delta CRLs are accessed.

Example

Decimal Value 79 = CRLs are published at that location (1) + Location is added to CDP (2) + Delta CRL location (4) + Include in all CRLs (8) + Publish Delta CRL at this location (64)

Decimal Value 65 = Publish CRL at this location (1) + Publish Delta CRL at this location (64)

Decimal Value 6 = Location is added to CDP (2) + Delta CRL location (4)

CRL Replacement Tokens

In the above examples, you may have noticed %1, %3, %4, %8, and %9. This represents how the CA is configured and what the file’s name should be. If the files are renamed, the AIA and CDP points may fail as the naming convention doesn’t match.

Based on the mapping value, the AIA and CDP points are given a naming convention to find the correct file from those locations.

Debugging CDP/AIA location issues

If the CDP/AIA locations are properly configured, these steps will temporarily help resolve the issues. For example, we will use AIA issues, which will also work for CDP issues.

After we open and check PKIView.msc, we can see where the issue is. We can copy the URL to a notepad for further investigation.

The AD doesn’t have our certificate if the issue is on the LDAP location. This is quite an easy fix.

Certificates retrieved via LDAP are retrieved from Domain Controller. If we open Domain Controller and ADSIEdit.msc, then we can navigate to Services > Public Key Services > AIA and check the present certificates. Since our Issuing CA Certificate is absent, the PKI environment cannot retrieve the certificate from that location.

To resolve this, we navigate to our issuing CA and run the command
certutil -dspublish -f <path to certificate> SubCA

Once the command runs successfully, we can refresh our PKIView.msc to check if the issue is resolved, and we should see a clean slate

However, if the AIA location #2, or the HTTP location is causing errors, this error is because the certificate isn’t present at that server endpoint.

To resolve this, we copy the certificate from %windir%\System32\certsrv\CertEnroll location to our web server, which hosts our certificate.

This would resolve our issue, which we can check on PKIView.msc again.

Conclusion

Issues with CDP and AIA locations can be tricky. Misconfiguration can often cause issues, which can be harder to track. With this guide, we hope to make the configuration of CDP/AIA points much easier with debugging steps to support any technical issues.