"Access Denied" When Requesting Certificate Through Web Access

It is possible to request a certificate from a Microsoft Certificate Authority with a Web browser.

The request is usually issued to the Certificate Authority (CA) in the form of "http://CA/certsrv" (where CA can be the FQDN or IP address of the Certificate Authority).

When you do so, the following message may be received: If you use the Certificate Management console to request the certificate, you may receive the following error message when you start the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-in:

This behavior can occur for the following reasons:

• The Certificate Authority service is not running.
• You do not have Read and Enroll permission for the template of the certificate that you are requesting.

To resolve this issue:

• Start the Certificate Services service.
• Grant Read and Enroll access for the template to the appropriate user or group by using the Sites and Services snap-in. You can set the access rights on the Security tab by expanding the following items: Services, Public Key Services, Certificate Templates. Note that the Show Services Node check box must be selected on the View menu to see the Services tab.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

When a CA is installed, domain users and domain administrators are granted Enroll access, but authenticated users are granted Read access by default. This causes problems with child and parent domains, depending on where the CA is installed. This also causes some templates not to appear in the list of available templates in a Web browser.