windows 7 - Searching for digital certificate on hard drive and reusing it

07
2014-07
  • James C

    Years ago I had to use a digital certificate for access to some web based application at college. It was provided by the "laboratory" where we used it. Presently it so happened that I will need to use the same one again, but have no clue as to where on hard drive it is located. However I am sure it is still hanging somewhere on the drive.

    So I would like to know, how do I search for one in Windows 7 ? Is it simply done by using the windows explorer search for a specific extension ? And will I be able to simply reuse it after I find it without any authentication issues ? Thank you.

    • Answers
  • Thomas W.

    Certificates can have many file types, depending on what kind of certificate it was. Some of them are:

    • .PFX - PKCS#12 archive
    • .P7B - PKCS#7 archive
    • .SPC - Software publisher certificate
    • .DER - DER encoded certificates
    • .CRT - X.509 certificate, base-64 encoded
    • .CER - X.509 certificate
    • .PEM - Privacy-enhanced electronic mail

    To quickly (!) search for any files by parts of the file name I recommend Search Everything. Just type whatever you know about the file name and it will find it.

    There are some things to remember:

    • Certificates often have a life time between 1 and 3 years, especially if it was an official (trusted) certificate. So if your certificate was issued "years ago", it might not be valid any more.
    • To use the certificate, you need the private key and the password for the private key. If you didn't use it for a long time, you might have forgotten the password.
  • Julian Knight

    Thomas has already listed the appropriate extensions but there is a simple way to search that doesn't need additional software.

    Simply use the CMD function DIR

    > dir c:\*.pfx /s

    The above will trawl through your C: drive looking for pfx files. It may take a while but it will certainly find them and report what folder they are in. This isn't dependent on Windows Indexing either.

    I'm afraid that Thomas is also right about the other issues you are likely to hit.


    • Related Question

    windows 7 - Major system wide issue regarding security certificates accessing sites and programs
  • GONeale

    I've got major system-wide issues as of about 30 minutes ago; the only thing I believe that could have caused this is after I went into sleep mode, well just before it, my PC rebooted, so I just shut it off, I then resumed Windows and ever since many of the apps I was using started throwing up errors regarding security certificates. First with Google Chrome with any https:// site I visit throwing up this error:

    enter image description here

    As you can see, this is on a Google Docs page so it won't be a problem with their certificate authority, but what seems to be, my installed copy of the 'Thawte Cert' even though the expiry has not reached?

    I also cannot login to Windows Live or TweetDeck (specifically complaining about certificates again, but this time a different one:

    enter image description here

    Pretty much anything requiring secure authentication is inaccessible.

    Does anyone know why this would have happened or what I can do to fix this? I am too scared to delete any of my certificates out of the store as I have no idea if they would automatically reinstall.


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  • 8088

    You would not believe it: after finally digging deep and finding a forum post speaking about a similar thing, it turned out that our system clocks were reset to 2002. This is probably what caused the certificates to appear expired, or invalid.

    It's nice to know a crashed sleep action can bork causing a time reset! Setting the date back to 2009 fixed the problem.