Digital certificates are small files that contain a series of personal and private information that is used to identify us through the Internet so that our identity can be verified and to be able to carry out all kinds of queries and negotiations through the Internet.
When we install a certificate in Windows 10 it is installed in a secure section within the operating system. This way it will be there and, when an application needs it, it will request access to it in order to use it.
One of the most common uses of these certificates is to use them in Google Chrome to facilitate our efforts, for example, in the Treasury or in the DGT, among other things.
In addition to the ones we install ourselves, many applications install their own certificates to make changes to the computer. These serve to ensure that the application is legitimate and reliable. And they are also used to sign the traffic that is exchanged with the servers to, for example, download updates in the background.
Even Windows has its own root certificates that make the operating system work normally and functions, such as Windows Update, can be used safely
How to view the digital certificates installed in Windows 10
All digital certificates that are installed on Windows are stored within the certificate manager. In this way, applications know where to look for a certificate when they need to use it.
See team certificates
If we are system administrators, we can check all these certificates using the certlm tool. To do this, we will simply open the Cortana search bar and execute the «certlm.msc» command on it.
Automatically we will open the window of this administrator, where we can see all installed on the computer.
As we can see, here we are going to find different categories. Depending on the purpose of each certificate, they will be stored in one directory or another.
View personal user certificates
The certificates that we have seen in the previous point are the certificates of the equipment, generated by Microsoft and other developers for the correct functioning of the computer. These are available to all users.
If you want to see the personal certificates, which are only available to our user, what we must do is execute the «certmgr.msc» command from Cortana to open this personal certificate manager.
A window similar to the previous one will open, with the difference that in this we will find all personal certificates, which are exclusive to our user. Specifically, in the "Personal" folder we will find all of these.
Applications that are installed exclusively for the Windows 10 user will copy their certificates here. The same is true, for example, with the work certificates or the FNMT certificate that we can use to view our Treasury or DGT data.
How to uninstall or delete a certificate
Here we will be able to find all the certificates installed on the computer. A certificate allows any program to have control over our equipment. Therefore, if we do not want a certain manufacturer to make changes to the system, we can uninstall your certificate.
Of course, we recommend you not to delete Windows certificates insanely, since eliminating something that we should not use our computer could start to malfunction. We can also make many applications stop working, or some security measures (such as automatic updates) do not work.
Despite this, if we want to delete a certificate, all we have to do is, from the previous window, select the certificate we want to delete, right-click on it and choose the option to delete the certificate
This certificate will disappear from the system, and will automatically cease to be available for Windows and any other application.
Date update on 2019-11-03. Date published on 2019-11-03. Category: windows Author: Oscar olg Fuente: softzone