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I have a trusted third party's root certificate. I install this to the 'Trusted Root Certification Authorities' certificate store in Windows Server 2008, but it disappears from the certificate store at unknown times.

What could be causing this?

  • The certificate has not expired
  • It doesn't appear to have been revoked
  • I can't see any relevant event logs around the times of incidents
  • It happens on my dev machine, test environments and production servers
  • The production servers are not on a domain, just a workgroup (hosted in Rackspace)
  • Querying group policy (gpresult /h foo.html) doesn't report that I'm prevented from trusting 3rd party root CA's

I'm using the following code in a c# command line app to install the cert:

X509Certificate2 certificate = new X509Certificate2("trusted-root-cert.cer");
X509Store store = new X509Store(StoreName.AuthRoot, StoreLocation.LocalMachine);

store.Open(OpenFlags.ReadWrite);
store.Add(certificate);
store.Close();

The certificate installation code happens to run every time I release a change to my application. I don't see how this could do any harm but it's worth mentioning.

There might be something wrong about the way I'm installing the certificate. What is the preferred way of installing?

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  • Do a gpresult /h foo.html and see if you have any Group Policies being applied that say something along the lines of "Prevent users from trusting third-party root certification authorities" or something along those lines?
    – Ryan Ries
    Oct 23, 2014 at 23:06

2 Answers 2

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Doing more thorough digging in the Application event log, this entry occured: 

Log Name:      Application
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-CAPI2
Date:          24/10/2014 12:49:10
Event ID:      4108
Task Category: None
Level:         Information
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Computer:      [redacted]
Description:
Successful auto delete of third-party root certificate:: Subject [...redacted...]

It turns out that 3rd party root CA's can be deleted by Windows if they are not recognised:

Typically, a certificate is used when you use a secure Web site or when you send and receive secure e-mail. Anyone can issue certificates, but to have transactions that are as secure as possible, certificates must be issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA). Microsoft has included a list in Windows XP and other products of companies and organizations that it considers trusted authorities.

http://toastergremlin.com/?p=144

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  • So, what is the verdict here? You cannot install an untrusted (by Microsoft) root CA at all? I have the same problem. I issue a development certificate for a local domain (signed by my own CA) and Windows removes it. In the past, I used a different custom cert, again issued by me, but for a different domain, and that was never removed... I wonder what are the criteria that Microsoft uses to remove things... I thought it might have to do with the valid TLDs, but that does not seem to be the case...
    – user2173353
    Sep 4, 2020 at 15:02
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I had the same problem when installing the certificate in AuthRoot.

Once I installed it in Root, everything was fine.

It is interesting to note what each value of the StoreName enum means:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.security.cryptography.x509certificates.storename?view=netcore-3.1

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