SSL Tools
It’s important to have a few SSL Tools in your toolbox. These tools make it easy to manipulate your certificates for your website. They aren’t always needed if you have good procedures in managing your SSL certificate stores.
Windows Platforms
These tools work in Windows Servers. Multiplatform tools are found in the Unix section.
DigiCert tool
This free tool can be downloaded here. It very easy to change the friendly name or export a certificate to be used on other webservers for either IIS or Apache. It also allows for multi-domain CSR generation.
PowerShell
PowerShell has several build in commands to manipulate the SSL store.
The most important command for this is knowing the correct path where SSL certificates are stored.
For IIS and other Server software
Get-ChildItem -Path Cert:\LocalMachine\My\
For Personal Certificates
Get-ChildItem -Path cert:\CurrentUser\My\The most common way is to append the SSL thumbprint to the path but you can use other qualifiers like Subject name, Friendly Name, etc. To the other qualifieres you can pipe the where clause to the path.
Examples
| where{$_.Subject -eq "CN=<common name value>"}
| where{$_.FriendlyName -eq "<Friendly Name>"}How to change the Friendly Name on an SSL Certificate using PowerShell
This example show how to change the Friendly Name. You can use any property that ID’s the SSL certificate like Subject Name, Thumbprint, Existing Friendly Name, etc.
Select one of these
$cert = Get-ChildItem -path Cert:\LocalMachine\My\<Thumbprint for SSL Cert>
$cert = Get-ChildItem -path `Cert:\LocalMachine\My\`| where{$_.Subject -eq "CN=<common name value>"}
$cert.FriendlyName = "New Friendly Name"Linux/Unix platforms
Organizing my notes, check back later.
References
Additional places to check out