CertificatePS

CertificatePS is a very small PowerShell module that provides two cmdlets:

• Get-CertificateTemplate
• New-DomainSignedCertificate

They could have been gists or just scripts, but I chose to package them in a module because I really love the convenience package repositories offer in terms of versioning and deployment.

The github repository is here.

Get-CertificateTemplate takes a System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates.X509Certificate2 instance and outputs the template name. By default, the template is not accessible as a property on the X509Certificate2 .net type. The cmdlet is a written based on these discussions. The certificate can be piped into the Get-CertificateTemplate. For example

Get-ChildItem cert:\LocalMachine\My | Get-CertificateTemplate

New-DomainSignedCertificate requests and issues a certificate from the domain certificate authority. This only works with the Active Directory ecosystem. The cmdlet is in fact a wrapper around multiple invocations of certreq.exe The cmdlet is a written based on these. The cmdlet needs the certificate authority. If you don’t know it then execute certutil in a command line and copy the value of the line config.

Here is an example for hostname example.com. The hostname will be the common name in the issued certificate.

New-DomainSignedCertificate -Hostname "example.com" -CertificateAuthority ""

The cmdlet will automatically generate a friendly name combining the date and hostname. e.g. 20160513.example.com. You can explicitly control this value from the -FriendlyName parameter. You can also have more control on the data of the certificate by using the optional parameters.

• Organization
• OrganizationUnit
• Locality
• State
• Country
• Keylength

Parameter -workdir controls where the intermediate files are generated.