How to Find Certificates by their Thumbprint

August 18, 2016 · 1 min read

Let's say you know the thumbprint of a certificate and want to see if it's installed. You can go through and check the properties of each certificate, but it's kind of a pain. You can do it much easier from Powershell. 

powershell cert 2 935553088

Open a Powershell prompt and type in 

cd CERT:\\

Then type in "ls" and you'll see your CurrentUser and LocalMachine Stores. From here you can search the entire store with the following command:

Get-ChildItem -Path 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX' - Recurse

(Where XXX is your thumbprint)

This will show you all the certs installed with that thumbprint:

powershell cert 1335854400

For more detail you can use Format-List: 

Get-ChildItem -Path 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX' - Recurse | Format-List -Property *

Also, You can also view thumbprints of all your certificates by listing them here. For instance to show all your local certs:

ls .\\CurrentUser\My

This is just one of many ways Powershell can make your life easier. While the MMC snapin works well, it's usually faster just to do what you can from the Powershell prompt. 

Are you an IIS Administrator? Do you want to be? Check out my new  IIS Administration Fundamentals course at Pluralsight! - J
This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Jeremy Morgan

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