AD Rights Management Service (Part 1): Architecture, Deprecation, and Reconnaissance

Active Directory Rights Management Services still ships in Windows Server 2025, years after Microsoft began steering customers to the cloud, and it remains fully supported on-premises. Part 1 maps the AD RMS trust model (the Server Licensor Certificate, the license flow, the SOAP surface) and shows how to discover an RMS deployment, fingerprint an AD RMS-protected file, and trace the path to that certificate's private key.