Public Key Infrastructure

Lync Server utilizes SSL certificates to protect connections by authenticating the endpoint and then encrypting transmissions. Lync Server can utilize either public or private certificates. This is to say that a Lync Server administrator has the option to purchase certificates from a publicly trusted third party such as Verisign or Digicert or he can choose to issue his own certificates from an internally developed PKI.

A PKI consists of hardware and software in addition to policies and procedures to create and manage digital certificates. Although a full explanation of how to plan and manage a PKI goes beyond the scope of this chapter, the decisions for how a PKI is built determine how far it can be trusted to secure identities and information.