Recently our organization started to provision Private certificates using Symantec Managed PKI Service. It has lot more appeal for IT admins because it takes out all user intervention which always creates support nightmares.
Previously I had direct access to the private key so it was easy to export it to all my devices and use for VPN and other secure stuff that needed to verify that I am indeed the real user. Because Symantec PKI is not available for Linux, it broke the VPN access from my Ubuntu system. Naturally I started to look for ways to export the key out of windows system. So here is what I did to get me out of the bind.
How to export certificates
First I installed Symantec PKI client on a windows 7 system. That was a no brainer because there was no other choice. I did not try with Windows 8 so YMMV. The main issue was that Windows certificate manager showed that the private key was not exportable. If it was then my quest would have been over right there. But I had to take another step. Mimikatz was the answer which marks them exportable and also allows to export them. Note: The patching that it does only lasts for that session. Once you reboot windows system you have to patch again using mimikatz. I used latest version which is 2.0 at the writing of this post.Continue reading →