How to publish a private certificate chain for Communicator Phone Edition (aka Tanjay)

Communication between the Communicator Phone Edition and Office Communications Server 2007 is by default encrypted using TLS and SRTP. Therefore the device needs to trust certificates presented by Communications Server 2007 servers. If you're using a well known Public Root CA (see table below), the certificate will automatically be trusted by the device.

Vendor	Certificate Name	Expiry Date	Key Lenght
Comodo	AAA Certificate Services	12/31/2020	2048
Comodo	AddTrust External CA Root	5/30/2020	2048
Cybertrust	Baltimore CyberTrust Root	5/12/2025	2048
Cybertrust	GlobalSign Root CA	1/28/2014	2048
Cybertrust	GTE CyberTrust Global Root	8/13/2018	1024
Verisign	Class 2 Public Primary Certification Authority	8/1/2028	1024
Verisign	Thawte Premium Server CA	12/31/2020	1024
Verisign	Thawte Server CA	12/31/2020	1024
Verisign	Comodo	1/7/2010	1024
Verisign	Class 3 Public Primary Certification Authority	8/1/2028	1024
Entrust	Entrust.net Certification Authority (2048)	12/24/2019	2048
Entrust	Entrust.net Secure Server Certification Authority	5/25/2019	1024
Equifax	Equifax Secure Certificate Authority	8/22/2018	1024
Geotrust	GeoTrust Global CA	5/20/2022	2048
Godaddy	Go Daddy Class 2 Certification Authority	6/29/2034	2048
Godaddy	https://www.valicert.com/	6/25/2019	1024
Godaddy	Starfield Class 2 Certification Authority	6/29/2034	2048

Table 1 - Public certificates trusted by Communicator Phone Edition

If you're using your own private Root CA the device may or may not trust the certificate. Communicator Phone Edition will query AD for objects of category certificationAuthority (CN=Certification Authorities, CN=Public Key Services, CN=Services, CN=Configuration, DC=<domain>, DC=<tld> ). If the query does not return any object or if the objects have empty caCertificate attributes the device will search for AD objects of category pKIEnrollmentService.

If you deployed Windows Certificate Services on a domain member server, that server will probably be already published. If not, to have the Root CA certificate placed in the caCertificate attribute, use the following command:

certutil -f -dspublish <Root CA certificate in .cer file> RootCA

Jens Trier Rasmussen has a nice blog post about this procedure.

But now imagine that you use a private certificate with a deep certificate path, how would you add the full certificate chain to AD?

I first came up with this problem recently, when I had to use a certificate from Saphety, a Portuguese public Certification Authority. Although Saphety certificates are generally trusted, since they are signed by ValiCert, this particularly long certification path (see figure below) was causing problems when used with Communicator Phone Edition. The symptoms were the same as if the certificate was not trusted.

The solution is to publish the whole certificate chain (both the Root CA and all subordinated CAs) in Active Directory. Here are the detailed steps:

1. Download the full certificate chain (.p7b file) and double click it
2. Expand the file name, select Certificates, right click each certificate on the right pane, select All Tasks and then Export...
   
3. Save each certificate as a .CER file.
   
4. Add the top level CA as a RootCA and all the others as SubCA, using the following commands:
   CertUtil -dsPublish -f www.valicert.com.cer RootCA
   CertUtil -dsPublish -f "RSA Public Root CA v1.cer" SubCA
   CertUtil -dsPublish -f "Saphety CA 01.cer" SubCA
   CertUtil -dsPublish -f "Saphety Server 01.cer" SubCA
   
5. Using ADSIEdit, verify that the objects were added under CN=Certification Authorities (CN=AIA for the Sub CAs ), CN=Public Key Services, CN=Services, CN=Configuration, DC=<domain>, DC=<tld> .
     

And that's it. Communicator Phone Edition should now be able to download the certificate from OCS and trust it. For more information, read Microsoft Communicator Phone Edition Deployment Guide.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  I recently had to upgrade 2 LG-Nortel IP Phone 8540 (aka Tanjay or OCPE) to the latest firmware available:

• Anonymous
  March 28, 2011
  The comment has been removed