I am importing X509 from PKCS #12 file (using PFXImportCertStore Cryptographic API) in Computer's Personal Store.
Problem:
Any process running under "Local Service" account or any non-admin account can not access privates key (restricted to Admin user by Windows).
How to give access to private keys of a certificate to non-admin users and local service?
Note:
Since multiple process use certificates, I preferred using Computers store instead user's store.
This is a tricky one with some pitfalls. I had the same problem and was close to despair, when I finally found the remark which saved me in this post
I succeeded to do this for a local service running under the Network Service account.
First, there is the option to grant other users access to the private key of a certificate in the MS certificate store. Already this I'd classify as druid knowledge: this option is available in the context menu (right click the certificate), but only if the certificate resides in the localMachine\Personal store. There, in the entry All tasks, you will find the sub entry Manage Private Keys. This is not available in other stores, not even in the CurrentUser\Personal store.
This entry opens a dialog which allows you to add access rights to the certificate for other users. Here, the next hurdle waits for you: the default setting is to search for users in the domain, not on the local machine. The desired user may not be found, unless you change the search filter.
To this result I came very fast by googling, but it did not help. I could get the service to run, but only if I changed the service user to the logon account, which is not what I wanted (this leads, btw, to a workaround: create a local user account for services and import the certificate from within that user account. You can then place the certificate in almost any store and it will work fine)
This is where the post cited above comes in, the last hurdle for me: the procedure described above seems to work only if you import the certificate into the certificate store from within the MMC snapin. Select the store localMachine\Personal and use the context menu to import the certificate in question. (I chose to make the private key exportable, this may or may not be relevant here). If you import the certificate by double clicking on it in the file system, it will be imported into some store in the Current User location. I used to do this and then move it into the localMachine\Personal folder and changed the access right -- this did never work for me. Only after importing it from within localMachine\Personal in the MMC certificate snap-in it worked immediately...
(Also note that you have to place the certificate into a store which can be found by the service user. Your current user stores usually does not allow this, so localMachine is the better choice, anyway)
I don't know whether you can move the certificate around afterwards, but that's easy to check in the system..
Related
One of our queue managers certificate is about to expire, it is been advised that renewing it is much cheaper than replacing the old one. These are the below steps which we are following(Through IBM Key Management):
Choose the personal certificate and select re-create - Renewal.csr
Send the Renewal.csr to CA for COMODO certificate - RenewedComodo
Choose the personal certificate and select Receive to import RenewedComodo. ( Refresh Security )
When creating a new certificate we opt for Personal Certificate Request and select new.This is the first step. and we follow the 2 and 3 steps.
Here is my query, other than selecting the re-create, there is no difference I had set up.
When I have two certificates as RenewalCOMODO and oldCOMODO, how do queue manager knows which is righteous.?
If it selects which is not expired, won't it be having the expired one in the database?
If we need to delete the old one, after adding the renewed one, How will it be different from replacing the certificates?
This will require a little background before getting to the answers.
When you initially created the CSR what you actually got was a public/private key pair and a Certificate Signing Request or "CSR". The CSR contains the public key and the requested attributes such as Distinguished Name. The CSR is signed with your private key so that any recipient can use the embedded public key to validate that the CSR and the requested attributes have not been tampered with.
What is less well known is that the CA is not bound to apply all the attributes that were provided in the CSR. For example, if the certificate purchased is a Domain Validated certificate and the CSR contains values for the OU field, the CA will simply delete them leaving only the DN and SAN fields plus their own information. Thus the certificate you get back may have different fields than the original CSR.
When you recreate the CSR from an in-use certificate the same process occurs again except that new CSR reflects any changes that the CA made originally. Close inspection of the original CSR and the newly generated one commonly show differences in the SAN or that an email contact has been added to the DN. However, from the CA's point of view these differences are cosmetic.
With that in mind, let's look at the questions again.
When I have two certificates as RenewalCOMODO and oldCOMODO, how do queue manager know which is right?
Assuming that you are talking about the artifacts the CA has provided after responding to the original and renewal CSR, the QMgr does not know which is which. You can run the receive command on either and, assuming both of them were signed by the same CA and use the same signer chain, either will work.
It is the administrator's responsibility to verify that the correct certificate is installed.
If it selects which is not expired, won't it be having the expired one in the database?
No. Each successful receive command keeps the private portions of the personal certificate and replaces the public portions. The label is associated with the private portion and this is checked for uniqueness so you cannot (or at least should not if there are no bugs) be able to have two copies in the same KDB.
If we need to delete the old one, after adding the renewed one, How will it be different from replacing the certificates?
Just make sure you receive the correct certificate. Always do a runmqakm -cert -details command or inspect the cert using the GUI.
Additional recommendations:
Always make a copy of the KDB before working on it.
Keep copies of your CSRs and certs in the KDB directory.
I like to use timestamps in the file names so it is obvious what the history was. My file names all start with YYYYMMDD like 20150908_QMName_CSR.arm and 20150908_QMName_CSR_signed.arm.
Make sure that the file permissions of the certificate files, KDB, and directory holding them are set to deny any access by anyone other than the MQM service account. If that's not possible, allow group access but make sure the members of the mqm group are as few as possible. Anyone who can read the certificates can use them. It is not necessary to know the password to the KDB to use the certs it contains.
When performing maintenance, I like to make a new copy of the KDB (with timestamped file name as described earlier) and when I'm sure it is ready I change the QMgr's SSLKEYR attribute to point to it. I then change the old file to be read-only and issue RESET SECURITY TYPE(SSL) on the QMgr.
Always remember to issue RESET SECURITY TYPE(SSL) on the QMgr. It is a rather disruptive command so try to not issue it when the QMgr is busy. It will require all channels to shut down and lots of reconnect attempts will prevent it from completing quickly.
The background
We have been using certificates to access a third party service from a windows 2003 box. The certificate recently expired so we went about getting a new one from the third party(Experian). We were provided with two certs to be installed in the "Trusted Root Certication Authorities" and two to be installed in the "Intermediate Certification Authorities" and then the main one that gets installed to the Personal\Certificates.
I know the certs are working when I can access a URL. If I install the certs allowing the cert decide where to install themselves (local Computer or Current User) they install to the current user store. I can then access the URL ... all is well.
The Issue
However I need the certificates to work on a computer level rather than a user level. So I move the certs to the relative Local Computer store locations however this does not work. I now cannot access the URL as any user. I tried deleting them all out and importing them directly into the required local computer cert location... still no joy. I tried installing them as the local admin .... still no joy. Tried granting access to the certs via winhttpcertcfg to everyone/specific users etc, still no joy.
Is it possible that the cert is designed to work for only one user? Is there something I am missing to make this work? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
As admin you should:
run mmc
add snapin for certificates (for local computer)
add root CAs to "Trusted Root Certication Authorities"
add intermediate CAs to "Intermediate Certification Authorities"
add end entity certificate with private key (it should be a .p12 or .pfx file) to Personal\Certificates
grant rights to user that can access the private key using winhttpcertcfg utility
and it should work (at least it did for me every time).
If you don't have private key corresponding to end entity certificate (because you deleted them all) then you need to get a new one from third party(Experian).
My service use certificate in CERT_SYSTEM_STORE_SERVICES.
The problem is that system makes usage of CERT_SYSTEM_STORE_SERVICES very uncomfortable.
I use MMC (started as Admin) and open Local services storage for my service. Then I import certificate from file there.
I expect that newly created storage and certificate will have appropriate permissions for my service (runs under NETWORK_SERVICE). However neither storage itself, nor the private key have permissions for NETWORK_SERVICE initially.
So, my questions is: is it by design or I should avoid CERT_SYSTEM_STORE_SERVICES ?
I have a certificate that has to be imported into Certificates/Trusted Root Certification Authorities and has a corresponding private key.
To actually access the key from code you need to set private key permissions to grant full access to particular IIS application pool. I totally understand that but the problem is that this can only be set on personal certificates and not trusted root ones.
I've tried adding the same certificate to Personal store and the following code doesn't break:
X509Store store = new X509Store(StoreName.Root, StoreLocation.LocalMachine);
store.Open(OpenFlags.ReadOnly);
foreach (X509Certificate2 cert in store.Certificates)
{
if (cert.HasPrivateKey)
{
// access private key here
}
}
store.Close();
Setting permissions on certificate in personal store works if I change StoreName.Root to StoreName.My. I'm able to access it there. But I'm not able to access it in root. It just says:
Keyset does not exist
Any suggestions?
Additional information
If I set my application pools identity to Local System (which has total permissions over my machine) I can successfully access private key. So the main question is how do I set permissions on my application pool identity to have access to private keys for certificates in the Trusted Root store.
Why trusted root store and not personal?
I have a pre-built assembly that accesses this certificate in this particular store, so simply placing the certificate in Personal store won't do the trick for me. That's why setting trust permissions on private keys of trusted root certificates is imperative.
I haven't tried this with the Trusted Root Certification Authorities but what I have found is the simplest thing to do with other Certificate Stores is to drag and drop the certificate into the Personal Store and then set permissions and then drag and drop back to the original certificate store. In your case the Trusted Root Certification Authorities.
Steps using Certificates MMC:
Import certificate to the store you want it and mark keys as exportable. (You might be able to bypass this and import directly to the Personal Store, but I haven't tried.)
Drag and drop the imported cert to the Personal Store.
Right click the certificate in the Personal Store and in the context menu, click "All Tasks", then in the submenu click on "Manage Private Keys". Set the appropriate permissions according to your app pool as referenced in step 1.
After permissions have been set, drag and drop the certificate back to the original store (in your case the Trusted Root Certification Authorities).
Solution
It is possible to set trust permissions on certificates other than those in Personal certificate store, but you can't set permissions via MMC. At least not directly on the store that is. Accepted answer shows a simplified approach with moving certificates around to achieve the same result.
You have to do it this way...
Getting the tool
Get WF_WCF_Samples file from Microsoft. This is a self extracting archive, but you won't need to extract everything. So...
Open the file with any archiver tool and only extract FindPrivateKey solution/project
Open in Visual Studio and compile it.
Finding your private key
Open MMC and add Certificates snap-in. Make sure you select Computer and Local Machine when adding it.
Select the store that has your certificate with private key.
Open private key and copy its Thumbprint
Open command prompt and navigate to the folder where you compiled your FindPrivateKey tool
Enter this command
FindPrivateKey YourStoreName LocalMachine -t "ThumbprintWithSpaces" -a
ie.
FindPrivateKey Root LocalMachine -t "83 45 22 ..." -a
Copy file along with path (it will liekly span over two lines so copy to Notepad and concatenate)
Grant certificate trust
open command prompt and enter:
icacls "FullPathOfYourPrivateKey" /grant:r "UserFQDN":f
ie.
icacls "c:\ProgramData..." /grant:r "IIS AppPool\ASP.NET v4.0":f
Done.
This will grant certificate private key full trust to your user (in my case above it's application pool identity) so you can use the key to sign data or do whatever you need to do with it.
In case you don't want full permissions, you can easily change the last part after colon. It can have many different settings, so I urge you to check icacls command help.
If you are using Windows Server 2003, you'll notice that you don't get the Manage Private Keys task under your certificate.
If you install Microsoft WSE 2.0 on to your machine, you can use a tool called X509 Certificate Tool. Just search for your cert, its more than likely in (or should be) in Local Machine / Personal Store.
NOTE: if you have your cert in Current User / Personal Store (which often is the default), it will only be accessible to the user that is currently logged in, which means if you want your webserver to access it, it can't without changing permissions to your AppPool.
You should be able to change the permissions to the private key very easily, by default, your AppPool on your webserver will be using NETWORK SERVICE to run your web application. So just add NETWORK SERVICE to the security and by default it will set the Read and Read / Execute permissions which is sufficient for your BouncyCastle, etc, to read the private key so you can sign your document.
Hope this helps.
Why the SYSTEM account is not able to access the user's certificate store?
At the same time the SYSTEM account is able to read the certificate (through the CSP dll) from the smart card and put it in the certificate store (CSP is being used by winlogon.exe in this case, so I guess the winlogon.exe has some magic inside).
For example, calling CertOpenSystemStore( NULL, L"MY" ) under system account will succeed, but CertFindCertificateInStore() will not find anything, because it looks like the store is empty. When I log on, the CertFindCertificateInStore() will find the requested certificate.
Every user has a different MY Store, So If you are able to find something in USER A login My Store, you might not be able to get that from User 2.
Try using MMC for accessing Certificate Stores of other users and service accounts.
Either you need to put the relevant certificates in the SYSTEM cert store or you need to impersonate the user whose store you wish to access. Impersonation can be done in multiple ways, I would suggest start looking at MSDN.