Book Image

Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook

Book Image

Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook

Overview of this book

Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) is the latest in a line of Application Publishing (Reverse Proxy) and Remote Access (VPN) Server products. The broad set of features and technologies integrated into UAG makes for a steep learning curve. Understanding all the features and abilities of UAG is a complex task that can be daunting even to experienced networking and security engineers. This book is the first to be dedicated solely to Microsoft Forefront UAG. It guides you step-by-step throughout all the stages of deployment, from design to troubleshooting. Written by the absolute experts who have taken part of the product’s development, official training and support, this book covers all the primary features of UAG in a friendly style and a manner that is easy to follow. It takes you from the initial planning and design stage, through deployment and configuration, up to maintenance and troubleshooting. The book starts by introducing UAG's features and and abilities, and how your organization can benefit from them. It then goes on to guide you through planning and designing the integration of the product into your own unique environment. Further, the book guides you through the process of publishing the various applications, servers and resources - from simple web applications to complex client/server based applications. It also details the various VPN technologies that UAG provides and how to take full advantage of them. The later chapters of the book educate you with common routine “upkeep” tasks like monitoring, backup and troubleshooting of common issues. Finally, the book includes an introduction to ASP, which some of the product's features are based on, and can help the advanced administrator with enhancing and customizing the product.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Certified Endpoints


As we have seen so far, UAG has several mechanisms to validate a user and the user's computer. We can check for a password, certain software products that are installed, and even the computer's domain membership—but is it SAFE? Well, real paranoids have no limits, and it's our job as information security specialists to be at least somewhat paranoid, right?

You probably know that a computer's domain membership can be faked rather easily, and a getting a user to cough out his password is also not very hard, mostly. However, unless you walk around with a tin-foil hat, you will probably agree that a digital certificate is one of the most solid ways to verify a computer's identity. For this, UAG supports Certified Endpoints, which means Endpoints that have a digital certificate. By issuing an individual digital certificate to every client by a corporate Certificate Authority server, we can be sure that an incoming client machine is really who it says it is. To be clear, this...