Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By : Dishan Francis
Book Image

Mastering Active Directory

By: Dishan Francis

Overview of this book

Active Directory is a centralized and standardized system that automates networked management of user data, security, and distributed resources and enables interoperation with other directories. If you are aware of Active Directory basics and want to gain expertise in it, this book is perfect for you. We will quickly go through the architecture and fundamentals of Active Directory and then dive deep into the core components, such as forests, domains, sites, trust relationships, OU, objects, attributes, DNS, and replication. We will then move on to AD schemas, global catalogs, LDAP, RODC, RMS, certificate authorities, group policies, and security best practices, which will help you gain a better understanding of objects and components and how they can be used effectively. We will also cover AD Domain Services and Federation Services for Windows Server 2016 and all their new features. Last but not least, you will learn how to manage your identity infrastructure for a hybrid-cloud setup. All this will help you design, plan, deploy, manage operations on, and troubleshoot your enterprise identity infrastructure in a secure, effective manner. Furthermore, I will guide you through automating administrative tasks using PowerShell cmdlets. Toward the end of the book, we will cover best practices and troubleshooting techniques that can be used to improve security and performance in an identity infrastructure.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Microsoft Passport

The most common way of protecting access to a system or resources is to introduce authentication and authorization processes. This is exactly what AD does as well. When a user logs in to a domain-joined device, AD first authenticates the user to see whether they're the user they claim to be. Once authentication is successful, it then checks what the user is allowed to do (authorization). To do that, we use usernames and passwords. This is what all identity infrastructure attackers are after. They need some kind of username and password to get into the system. Passwords are a rather weak authentication method. They are breakable, and it's just a matter of time and methods used. As a solution, organizations are tightening password policies, but when they are forcibly made complex, more and more people start to write down. I have seen a few people who...