I am posting here because my update on the wiki got rejected as spam. If I can get that fixed I will repost it to the wiki.
Anyway here is what I wanted to post. Regards John Aherne Some additional information regarding wincertstore. My reading of the runes relating to automatic and dynamic updates is as follows: In an organisation with a sysadmin, dynamic updates will be turned off and an internal mechanism will be in place to update clients. Dynamic updates represents too much of a security risk. There is also an option from Microsoft on a daily basis to automatically update the certificate store So sysadmins can either arrange to have the daily update occur or have it downloaded to a central system under their control where they distribute the update plus any other certificates they need to add for company use. In smaller organisations no doubt the automatic update will be left in place. It would seem that the dynamic update is part of windows os and the application is not involved in the process. The verification either succeeds or fails. As an example see this link that contains this info:-- http://dreamlayers.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/windows-7-cant-always-automatically.html <<Today Secunia PSI refused to run with the message: "an error occurred while verifying the security certificate". Then I found that IE refused o show https://secunia.com because the certificate was "not issued by a trusted certificate authority". Firefox did not have a problem with that webpage. For some reason, IE did not recognize the "Thawte Server CA" certificate. IE also refused to recognize StartSSL. This was really weird, because as far as I know, Windows 7 is supposed to automatically update root certificates. Microsoft even explains how the process works in Vista. My first thought was that my firewall was blocking the update, but that was not it. Event log showed event 4100 from CAPI2, which is "Successful auto update retrieval of third-party root certificate". The problem was event 4110: "Failed to add certificate to Third-Party Root Certification Authorities store with error: A certificate chain could not be built to a trusted root authority." I manually downloaded and installed the latest root certificate update from Windows Update. After that, everything works. I'm just left wondering why I had to deal with this in the first place. A later comment says: I think this may be because Cryptographic Services (CryptSvc) was unable to access the Internet because of the firewall. Its description says that it includes the "Automatic Root Certificate Update Service, which retrieves root certificates from Windows Update". There are CAPI2 events relating to downloading and unpacking a root certificates .CAB file, and those do not appear in my event log.>> So windows cryptographic services does the dynamic check for certificate verification. However, you can always download the latest certificate store and update it yourself. This strikes me as similar to using the firefox download as happens on many linux systems and how the requests library works. I did a simple test to see if the dynamic update works on my win7 system. I used certmgr.msc to delete the GoDaddy root certificate. I then opened a browser to the godaddy site to see what would happen. In some side bar I saw a link that said the cert was failing but the main site site connected without problems. When I checked the certificate store there was still no godaddy root certificate. So what was happening? I then downloaded the update and updated my store. I ended up with about 200 entries. More than before but since I did not make a note I can't really be sure if I got more than when I started. I just need to run some more tests to see how this dynamic update is supposed to work. Manually updating the certificate store The link to manually update the certifcate store is below: To Manually install the certificates 1. Download http://download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/rootsupd.exe 2. Extract the files using the command rootsupd.exe /c /t:C:\temp\extroot 3. from c:\temp\extroot run the following 4 commands (from an elevated prompt) updroots.exe authroots.sst updroots.exe updroots.sst updroots.exe -l roots.sst updroots.exe -d delroots.sst Here is an extract from microsoft technet explaining how the automatic update works. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749331(WS.10).aspx <<The Update Root Certificates feature in Windows Vista is designed to automatically check the list of trusted authorities on the Windows Update Web site when this check is needed by a user's application. Specifically, if the application is presented with a certificate issued by a certification authority in a PKI that is not directly trusted, the Update Root Certificates feature (if it is not turned off) will contact the Windows Update Web site to see if Microsoft has added the certificate of the root CA to its list of trusted root certificates. If the CA has been added to the Microsoft list of trusted authorities, its certificate will automatically be added to the set of trusted root certificates on the user's computer. The Update Root Certificates feature can be turned off in Windows Vista by using Group Policy. For more information, see "Procedures for Viewing or Changing Group Policy Settings that Affect Certificates in Windows Vista," later in this section.>> Below is a link to a mozilla forum where the sysadmins have been complaining over the past 7 years that firefox will not support wincertstore so it can be integrated into their control systems. As a result they drop firefox and only support chrome and IE. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432802 -- *John Aherne* *www.rocs.co.uk <http://www.rocs.co.uk>* 020 7223 7567
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