Source Code: Download Zip Archive
As you have ended up here I must assume that, like me, you have a requirement to interface with a SCEP server using .NET and you have struggled to find any helpful examples of how to achieve this. I hope that this blog entry might be of some help to the few that venture into this obscure territory.
Background
As a little bit of background (there is too much to cover here), when I began my investigations into this area it seemed that there was pretty much only one option for implementing a .NET SCEP client and that was to use the Bouncycastle library, as the CLR System.Security.Cryptography API has some glaring omissions such as representation of a PKCS#10 request or ASN.1 DER type conversion. However this didn’t turn out to be quite the option that I had hoped. Firstly, I struggled to find any examples of a SCEP client implemented using Bouncycastle. Perhaps more importantly using 3rd party libraries always come with a risk, unless you know the code inside-and-out you have to place some trust in the authors to do the right thing. When it comes to integrating with a PKI – a major part of the infrastructure that you use to secure your digital estate – that risk seemed too great and so we had two options: either audit the Bouncycastle code-base or roll our own using the stock CLR APIs. Upon initial investigation of Bouncycastle I discovered quite quickly that it is a huge code-base and so I quickly turned to investigating building our own client, after all Bouncycastle did it so I knew it was possible, how hard could it be?
As it turns out it isn’t that hard, at least once you know the problem space, which turns out to be quite a mountain to climb for the uninitiated such as myself. My hope is that, having investigated the problem space and tackled some of the major hurdles, I am in a position to help some other people out in this area and provide a shortcut worth several days’ of effort that I could have done without.
The Example
To be clear, this isn’t going to be a full introduction into the ASN.1 and PKCS standards, there is plenty of that already very easily accessible on the Internet. Rather this is a simple working example of using the System.Security.Cryptography APIs to interface with a SCEP server. The code is documented with inline and XML comments that should point you to the online reference docs needed to understand the what and the why.
The Certificate Requests
The example I’ve provided here is in the form of a VS 2013 Unit Test project (converted from VS 2010 so beware of the old school Unit Test config!). This PoC was created for the specific case of receiving PKCS#10 signing requests and forwarding them to a PKI for enrolment via SCEP. This means that we were not concerned with creating the requests programmatically. If that is what you are after then I would suggest looking at using CertEnrol or automating the OpenSSL API. There are plenty of examples of using CertEnrol via the CERTCLIENTLib and CERTENROLLib DLLs, which are available on all Windows PC OS versions since, I think, XP. A good one is here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alejacma/archive/2008/09/05/how-to-create-a-certificate-request-with-certenroll-and-net-c.aspx?PageIndex=3. I struggled to find a simple way of forming a PKCS#10 request with the challenge password required by most SCEP environments. At any rate, I’m wandering outside the scope of this post and I ended up creating PKCS#10 requests for my tests using Open SSL at the command line.
The SCEP Server
When developing this PoC I was working with the NDES MSCEP component that comes with Active Directory Certificate Services. There are numerous other SCEP servers available, such as OpenSSL and theoretically this PoC should work with all of them. I just felt it was worth pointing this out so that you can bear it in mind while working with the example .
Lets Get Going Already!
You will need to tweak some of the example’s settings to fit within your environment but the logic itself is sound. Start by configuring URL of the SCEP server and the subject name that is used to locate the local/client certificate for signing the SCEP enrolment request. These can both be found at the top of the Unit Test class.
The example project contains a folder named ‘SCEP Tools’ that contains the Open SSL config and batch commands to create the PKCS#10 requests needed for the tests. Once created, update the respective request string variables in each test method with the request contents and you should be good to go!
Source Code: Download Zip Archive
