The Events
Windows clients can request certificates on their own (autoenrollment) or with the help of a user. When enrolling for a certificate you may find this pair of events in your Application log:
Source: Microsoft-Windows-CertificateServicesClient-CertEnroll
Event ID: 64
Level: Information
User: S-1-5-18
User Name: NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM
Computer: <servername>
Description: Certificate enrollment for Local system successfully load policy from policy server
Source: Microsoft-Windows-CertificateServicesClient-CertEnroll
Event ID: 65
Level: Information
User: S-1-5-18
User Name: NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM
Computer: <servername>
Description: Certificate enrollment for Local system is successfully authenticated by policy server {AFD04357-74D7-47B3-82BC-BBE76F4E6F3D}
Obviously the local system successfully enrolled for a certificate, but what do these actually tell us?
Decoding
Let’s start with the first event with if 65 (remember, the newest events are at the top of the event log). It tells us that a CA, included in a certificate enrollment policy, identified by GUID, has successfully authenticated the system’s enrollment request. In the Windows help we find this about certificate enrollment policies:
Certificate enrollment policy provides the locations of certification authorities (CAs) and the types of certificates that can be requested. Organizations that are using Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) can use Group Policy to provide certificate enrollment policy to domain members by using the Group Policy Management Console to configure the certificate enrollment policy settings. The Certificates snap-in can be used to configure certificate enrollment policy settings for individual client computers unless the Group Policy setting is configured to disable user-configured enrollment policy.
Unless you have added some yourself, there is one default certificate enrollment policy, the Active Directory Enrollment Policy.
To display the enrollment policies you can run certutil.exe –Policy. It will give you a list of your enrollment policies:
Name: Active Directory Enrollment Policy
Id: {AFD04357-74D7-47B3-82BC-BBE76F4E6F3D}
Url: ldap:
NextUpdate: EMPTY
LastUpdate: EMPTY
Url Flags = 15 (21)
PsfLocationGroupPolicy — 1
PsfAutoEnrollmentEnabled — 10 (16)
0x4 (4)
Authentication = 2
Kerberos — 2
AllowUntrustedCA: 0
Priority: 7ffffffd (2147483645)
CertUtil: -Policy command completed successfully.
If you look back at the events at the beginning of this post you will recognize the GUID in the event with ID 65. The GUID in the event is the Enrollment Policy ID. So that event is saying that the system was successfully authenticated against the Active Directory Enrollment Policy. Here is a screenshot of the policy as well:
NOTE: If you want to see the defalt certificate enrollment policy and create new ones you need to use Group Policy. You can also create new certificate enrollment policies using the Certificates MMC. See the links below:
- Manage Certificate Enrollment Policy by Using Group Policy
- Manage Certificate Enrollment Policy by Using the Certificates Snap-in
Now, if you want to see which CAs are in that enrollment policy you can run certutil.exe –CA (my output is concatenated):
Name: Active Directory Enrollment Policy
Id: {AFD04357-74D7-47B3-82BC-BBE76F4E6F3D}
Url: ldap:
6 CAs:
CA[0]:
CAPropCommonName = <CA Name>
CAPropDNSName = <CA Server FQDN>
CAPropCertificateTypes =
0: EFSRecovery
1: EFS
2: DomainController
3: WebServer
4: Machine
5: User
6: SubCA
7: Administrator
CAPropSecurity = <SDDL>
Without the Certificate Enrollment Policy Web Service role service installed, the only way to get certificate policy information from Active Directory is by using LDAP. This can obviously be a problem so the Certificate Enrollment Policy Web Service role service was created to allow certificate policy information to be retreived over HTTPS also. The Web Service functions as a proxy; accepting client requests for policy over HTTPS and querying Active Directory for certificate policy information over LDAP.
So now we know what the first event (ID 65) means.
The next event is much easier; it just says that the system was able to load the certificate enrollment policy successfully from the CA.
More information: