Creating Certification Authority for Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat

Question

Can you please give me a hint on how to create CA to Digitally Sign MS Office documents (2007 or 2010) as well as Adobe Acrobat files.

I know that MS Office supports this. All you have to do is to use existing CA. However, we'd like to create our own.

If you can direct me (and others who asking this question) by giving book names, articles. That would do the job.

Basically it's a very small organization where we'd like to start automating working with documents. And after proper tests, we'd buy, then, if needed, certificates from CA's.

I found this article: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-sharepoint-services-it/setting-up-a-certification-authority-HA001191500.aspx

However I am not sure if this can work for Digital Signing of the MS Office and Adobe Acrobat documents?

Answer 1

You really need to think carefully about why you are signing these documents. If it is for any legal purpose, you must get professional support for setting up a PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) - which is what you actually need. A Certification Authority is only one part of the PKI.

The reason for this is that PKI's are very sensitive to configuration issues. When misconfigured they are worse than useless.

If you only want to use the signing internally for a limited number of people, I would simply set up some self-signed certificates using the certificate signing tool provided with Office since setting up a PKI, even a simple one, to do this wouldn't really be worth it. Providing self-signed certificates is sufficient to get round the macro warnings in MS Office.