Configuring Certificate-based Authentication in SQL Server Express' Distributed Service Broker Environment 
(Marcin Policht) In the recent articles of our series dedicated to the most prominent features incorporated into SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, we have been discussing Service Broker functionality. So far we have presented a couple of scenarios demonstrating implementation of a sample dialog between two services residing in the same database and an equivalent arrangement taking place in a distributed environment. As we have pointed out, while the former could be conducted without any security-related provisions, the latter, at the minimum, required the presence of an authentication mechanism (which facilitates Service Broker transport security). For the sake of simplicity, we decided to use Windows-based Kerberos protocol (as determined by the value of AUTHENTICATION option assigned to both endpoints) for this purpose, which, while fairly straightforward to set up, limits the scope of systems participating in a Service Broker dialog to those residing in the same or trusted Active Directory domains. However, it is possible to eliminate this limitation by employing certificates. We will provide an overview of such an approach in this article (note that the functionality described here does not depend on using dialog-level encryption).
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