Traverse Local Certificate Store With Powershell

Windows Certificate Store is typically accessed using the MMC Snap-In, You can view both the Computer or User certificate stores using a traditional MMC console. Sometimes though, you may just want to programmatically access it using PowerShell. Luckily you can do this using a PSDrive that is created on your machine.

As you can see there is a Cert drive and you can access it using PowerShell’s multiple location based Cmdlets. For example, if you can use cd Cert:\ and it will change your current directory to the certificate PSDrive. You can also use Set-Location,Push-Location, Pop-Location etc. when access your PSDrives.

Once you have changed your directory to PS Cert:\> you can use your normal tools like ls or dir to identify what is in your certificate stores.

cd Cert:\
ls
# View your current local user certificate store
cd .\\CurrentUser\My\

# View your current local machine certificate store
cd .\\LocalMachine\My\

Using PowerShell you can access all your certificates and the certificate store using PowerShell.