PowerShell :- Certificate Store Navigation

By Joseph Kravis on March 4, 2017 • ( 0 )

COMMENTS ARE ALWAYS WELCOMED ON MY POSTS:

STARTING OUT

For starters there are several methods for working and viewing certificates. These are the steps I took while digging into certs. I’ll try and go over things in a top down fashion so it will be easy to follow along.

When starting in PowerShell and running as administrator the default location is c:\windows\system32. I like changing or creating a temp directory where commands and output can be traced quickly by having all items in one central location. Your PowerShell Profile should be setup to use a different folder as your starting folder. Standard output items could end up in c:\windows\system32 and I’d rather not clutter up that folder with extra output that really should not be in that folder.

(Get-Help about_profiles) is a good starting point when reading about profiles.
Example set your location to use the home path: Set-Location $env:homepath.
Setting your to something different all should be ok. For running my examples I’m going to Set-Location to the PSPATH “CERT”.

Import the PKI Module if you have the IMPORT-MODULE PKI in your PowerShell profile you won’t have to import the module as it will already be there.

You can and should set your default directory in your $Profile

I’m setting location to “CERT” as this is where I want to start out. With out the semicolon at the end of CERT:
you’ll receive an error so just re-enter and add :.

Clear the host that’s more for me at this point so I could have a clean capture. 🙂

Running GET-CHILDITEM shows us the certificate stores located on the machine for the current user and
local machine. You can SET-LOCATION to either CurrentUser or LocalMachine. For now I’ll go with LocalMachine

And, once in CERT:/ SET-LOCATION CurrentUser then run GET-CHILDITEM.

The certmgr screen can be assessed via command line with this command Invoke-item CERT:

There are some differences in appearance but essentially can do the same with both interfaces. In another post I’ll go over the GUI screen.

Switch to the LocalMachine area. SET-LOCATION CERT:\LocalMachine

So, far we’ve setup to begin working with certificates. The following is a listing of commands that can be used
while working with certificates.
For Source you can see that PKI is listed. That’s because we IMPORTED-MODULE PKI