How to remove certificate using powershell

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Hi,

There is some code online that is supposed to do what I'm trying to do, but it didn't work for me, trying it in the PowerShell commandline line by line.

I am trying to delete a certificate from the CurrentUser\My store, by its' thumbprint:

Quote:
get-childitem cert:CurrentUser\My

(that works and lists my certificates with their respective thumbprints)

then what? how does the remove-item command works? I have tried:

Quote:
$store = New-Object System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Store("My","CurrentUser)
$thumbprint = "91110a3dd00d5a03a7c7585303fe787653cd4c14"
$cert = $store.Certificates.Find("FindByThumbprint", $thumbprint, $TRUE)
Remove-Item -Path cert:\CurrentUser\My\$cert

I get:

Quote:
Confirm
The item at cert:\CurrentUser\My\ has children and the Recurse parameter was not specified. If you continue, all
children will be removed with the item. Are you sure you want to continue?
[Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help (default is "Y"):

which means I'm doing something wrong...

what's the correct syntax for remove-item to remove a specific certificate from my store?

Much thanks for any suggestions,
Ron.

Posted 28-May-13 3:21am

Ron Anoshi

Updated 23-Jun-21 13:56pm

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4 solutions

Solution 2

I am running Powershell on Win2k16: 5.1.14393.3471
I could only get the following syntax to work, I had to remove "-Force" from the command in order for the loop to iterate through each item in the list. I am checking for certificates than have less than 40 days left before they expire:

Get-ChildItem -Path Cert:\LocalMachine\Root | Where-Object {$_.NotAfter -lt (Get-Date).AddDays(40)} | ForEach-Object {Remove-Item -Path "Cert:\LocalMachine\Root\$($_.Thumbprint)" -Recurse -Verbose}

Also, you should issue a check for the number of certs in the "Root" store before and after the import of the sst file, using the below command:

(Get-ChildItem -Path Cert:\LocalMachine\Root).Count

I hope that saves someone a bunch of time, because I spent quite a bit of time with trail and error.

Good luck!

Posted 9-Mar-20 9:09am

Member 14767946

Solution 3

get-childitem cert:\CurrentUser\My | Remove-Item

Posted 11-Jun-20 6:17am

Member 14860372

Solution 4

You've got the thumbprint via

PowerShell

get-childitem Cert:\CurrentUser\My

Using your example above, all you need to do is include the thumbprint in the path when you're using remove-item:

PowerShell

remove-item -Path Cert:\CurrentUser\My\91110a3dd00d5a03a7c7585303fe787653cd4c14

or

PowerShell

$thumbprint = "91110a3dd00d5a03a7c7585303fe787653cd4c14"
remove-item -Path "Cert:\CurrentUser\My\$thumbprint"

Posted 23-Jun-21 13:56pm

SiTeW

Comments

Richard Deeming 24-Jun-21 4:06am

Essentially the same as the accepted solution, posted back in 2013.

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Member 10358378 · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-24T10:02:00

Solution 1

PHP

$Certs = get-childitem cert:"CurrentUser\My"

$Certs | %{Remove-Item -path $_.PSPath -recurse -Force}

Posted 24-Oct-13 10:02am

Member 10358378

Comments

Ron Anoshi 5-Aug-15 4:41am

Sorry for the delayed accept, There have been much water under that bridge...
I accepted your solution since it seems correct, but have no way to check it right now.