Root certificates are imported on domain members into the certificate store for intermediate certificate authorities

Some will have noticed that the certificate store for intermediate CAs usually also contains certificates for root CAs.

As a rule, this behavior is not critical. In certain cases however, this can also cause problems with applications.

Cause

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Looking at the physical certificate stores, which provides information about the origin of the certificates, it quickly becomes clear that the certificates are replicated to the clients by the Active Directory.

The reason for this is the autoenrollment process, which stores a replica of the "Public Key Services" object from the Active Directory locally. Here the "AIA" folder is transferred locally to the certificate store for intermediate certificate authorities.

The "AIA " folder can be conveniently viewed via the Enterprise PKI (pkiview.msc) management console.

The root certificates were imported into the "AIA" folder below "Public Key Services". This is a side effect that usually occurs during the installation of the certificate authority.

Usually, the root certificate is uploaded to Active Directory after their installation. Usually the following command is used for this.

certutil -f -dspublish {filename.crt}

However, as you can see, the certificate is copied not only to "Certification Authorities", but also to "AIA".

Removing root certificates from the certificate store for intermediate certificate authorities on domain members

The deletion can be performed via the Enterprise PKI (pkiview.msc) management console. This requires write permissions on the corresponding Active Directory object, which by default is held by the Enterprise Administrators group of the forest.

Side effects

If the root certification authority also uses an LDAP path for Authority Information Access (AIA), it should be considered to deactivate this path for certificates issued in the future.

This change has no effect on certificates already issued. It will only be effective for certificates issued as of this date. However, since the creation of the certificate chain does not use the AIA for root certificate, it should not be in use anyway.

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