Some time ago, one of our customers contacted us with a special request. For some legitimate reason, they needed to centrally collect certain certificates including their private keys which were distributed across many client systems running Windows and stored in the corresponding user stores. Unfortunately (only in this case, but actually good from a security perspective), the particular private keys were marked non-exportable making a native export in the context of the user impossible. As if this wasn’t enough, the extraction was supposed to be executed in the context of the current user (i.e. without administrative privileges) while not triggering the existing Anti Virus solution at all. Also, the certificates needed to be transferred to some trusted system where they could not be accessed in an unauthorized way. So let’s have a look how we tackled these problems:
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