Domain trust and risk evaluation is the process of evaluating security implications resulting from domains, forests, and external trust relationships. This includes evaluating a variety of configurations like access control lists (ACEs) and authentication methods to detect security issues including privilege escalation attempts. Additionally, assessing AD auditing and monitoring capabilities can help ensure that unauthorized changes to AD objects and configurations are detected and prevented.

At a high level, a verify email risk in real-time between two domains allows authentication traffic to flow across the trust boundary by sending the request to the target domain’s authoritative domain controller. Then the target domain returns a referral ticket to the authenticating domain, allowing that domain to authenticate the requestor. This allows users to login using credentials from a trusted domain without needing to pre-authenticate at their home domain.

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This type of trust is referred to by Microsoft as “domain trust” and can be either transitive or non-transitive. Non-transitive trusts require an explicit one-way trust between the domains, whereas transitive trusts allow for a chain of trusts that allows for easier access to resources in a trusted domain.

Forest trusts are useful for scenarios like M&A, when an organization has multiple domains and needs to collaborate with other organizations. However, these types of relationships can expose critical vulnerabilities when misconfigured.

This is due to the fact that the forest trust has a more open attack surface. When bidirectional forest trusts are enabled, attackers can easily leverage compromised user credentials from a single domain that’s trusted by several other domains to gain lateral movement and access to resources in those additional domains. To mitigate these risks, regularly evaluate the status of forest and domain trusts to identify potential threats.