Viewing and Installing RDP Server Certificate

PKI Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and Server Certificate

∟Viewing and Installing RDP Server Certificate

This section provides a tutorial example on how to view and install a RDP server certificate to local client system to avoid authentication error.

If you want to see the details of the RDP server certificate and fix the authentication error, you can continue the previous tutorial with the following steps:

1. Click "View certificate" on the security warning screen. The certificate of the remote system is displayed.

2. Verify the "Issued to" field. You should see something like, "dbserver.company.com", which should be the host name of the remote system.

3. Verify the "Issued by" field. You should see a trusted Root CA name, like "GlobalSign". In this case, the administrator of the remote system did a good job by obtaining and installing a valid certificate recognized by the PKI network.

4. If you see "Issued by" is the same as the "Issued to", like "dbserver.company.com", the administrator of the remote system did a poor job by using a self-signed certificate. This will cause the client system to display the authentication warning screen.

If the remote system is using a self-signed certificate, you have two options:

Click "OK" to ignore the warning for this connection session. The certificate will still be used to encrypt data exchanged between the client and the server.
Click "View certificate" and "Install Certificate" to install it in the "Trusted Publishers" certificate store. So the certificate will be authenticated in future connection sessions.