PKI Certficate Update

[mlajoie]

A couple of years ago, we moved to a PKI smart card authentication at pre-boot.  We are now having large sets of users having to renew their certificate.

I read KB79665 a few months ago.  My first thought on reading it was that the process looked like this:

1. User updates their certificate in AD
2. ePO LDAP synchronization task runs and captures the new certificate
3. After two ASCIs, the MDE policy enforcement periods will have found the new certficate and updated it in the PBFS.

This meant that the user would not have to do anything and the certificate would update on its own -- it would just take time.

I have read it again and now I think differently.  It looks like, no matter what, a reset token recovery needs to happen for every user, regardless.  Am I reading that correctly or, hopefully, have I misread it?

With upwards of 20,000 users having to update their certificate in the next few months, it will be quite the burden for the service desk to have to run 'reset token' recoveries.

Please advise.  Thanks.

[cross]

If I am following what you wrote about your environment, specifically that the certificates are imported to AD, updated in AD as applicable, etc. then I would not expect the need to reset the token for these users overall.  If, however, the users' tokens are self-initializing cards\tokens, then the process in method 2 of that article would apply.  

Of course, you should be able to confirm this with a single user test in the environment by updating the certificate, making sure AD has it updated, completing the LDAP synchronization and then synchronizing with the client system.  The applicable message should show up in the MfeEpe.log and then you can reboot to test.  As a precaution, I always recommend to take a backup of data before testing.  This is just a general good practice, I don't expect any trouble, especially any that would be unrecoverable but I still recommend it just in case unexpected situations arise.